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Review
'I loved this wonderful book – its strangeness, its obsessiveness, its beautiful sentences.' Monica Ali
’Doerr's sublime renditions of Winkler's attunement to the world around him turn his story into a prolonged epiphany, a blissful parable about grace. This is a formidable literary achievement that, link Winkler's snow crystals, integrates facets and dimensions into near-perfect whole.' Independent
‘Doerr's gifts as a stylist are powerfully in evidence: his writing is crystalline, his attention to detail intense and evocative. That Doerr is a writer of exceptional gifts is not in question,
and there is much to admire in this novel.' Daily Telegraph
'Doerr writes wonderfully, lyrically, of the natural world, and his observations of water, snowflakes and clouds illuminate this impressive debut.' Guardian
‘Exceptional first novel. I hesitate to say this book will take your breath away because it's such a cliché; but, really, I promise you, it will… I can't remember when a novel so entranced me. The only criticism I can really muster – and it is rather a limp one – is that About Grace is almost inhumanely faultless; almost, but, even then, not quite.' Evening Standard
’In careful, measured prose conjures a sense of awe both humbling and salutary. It has the bleak, lucid beauty of a day of midwinter light. At its best when describing the minute, disregarded miracles of the natural world, it lingers in the mind like one of the protagonist's eerie dreams.' Daily Mail
Praise for The Shell Collector:
'An extraordinary debut collection, filled with the vastness of the natural world pressing against human insignificance.' Guardian
‘A show-stopping debut, as close to faultless as any writer could wish for' Los Angeles Times
'A fine collection… Doerr's prose dazzles from the very beginning.' New York Times
'Perilously beautiful, precise and elegant… Doerr can describe a woman running through a Tanzanian forest with the careful specificity of a scientist and the awe of a poet; he can give you a sunrise with the glory-bound colours of apricot and gold, and two pages later you're meeting a young woman in Idaho, who falls in love with the metal-eater at the country fair… Breathtaking.' Boston Globe
'An impressive first collection… Doerr's stories evoke the ecstatic feeling that comes from loving something or someone very much.' TLS
'Loss, estrangement and distance are the collection's keynotes. Doerr frames and executes these stories with seemingly effortless panache.' Economist
Guardian
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Happy to recommend,
By EmmaH (Dorset, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
This review is from: About Grace (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Well, this book put paid to my suspicions that only lesser works of fiction make it onto the Vine programme. 'About Grace' is a beautifully written exploration of love, loss and culpability, and deserves much wider acclaim than it has previously received.
The plot can be a little frustrating at times - or rather the hero's character tends to frustrate. You just want to grab Winkler and shake him and shout 'Just go find out, for god's sake', but his prevarication was, I think, wholly believable, and helped to build up the rising tension as we approach the end of the novel. Moreover, each sentence is so exquisitely crafted and expressive, that it is always a joy to read. Doerr is a consummate craftsman, and these days that is always something to be highly valued.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Doesn't live up to expectations ...,
By
This review is from: About Grace (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
I really wanted this to be a good book, but I was let down.
Winkler dreams the future. He dreams that he is instrumental in his baby daughter's death, so he puts as much distance between them as he possibly can. Many years later, he returns to his home town to try to find out about his daughter's fate. The main problem with the novel is that it moves at a snail's pace, and, predicting the future in dreams aside, the ending isn't really believable - it just doesn't feel right, it is too neat. Apparently, the Daily Telegraph said that 'His writing is crystalline, his attention to detail intense and evocative...'. In my opinion, Doerr's attention to detail is so intense that you can never get caught up in the flow of the story because describing everything takes forever. And then there is Winkler's obsession with water. If you aren't interested in endless descriptions of cloud formations and snowflakes, this is not the novel for you. If only Doerr could have resisted the urge to be overly descriptive, this would have been a really good novel - even with the unlikely ending.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Plodding and over-long,
By
This review is from: About Grace (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
From the plaudits on the front and the glowing newspaper reviews you'd think that this was one of the best works of fiction ever written, but I think that's very much a matter of whether you like Doerr's overtly wordy style. It's the story of David Winkler, a thirty-something Alaskan hydrologist who's afflicted by regular dreams in which he foretells future events, the most evocative of which is the death of his infant daughter in the Ohio floods. To try and stop these events from coming true Winkler leaves the US and heads for a remote Caribbean Island and returns twenty-five years later to find out the fate of his estranged daughter.
I must admit that I found this book a struggle to read, it's over long (399 pages of small font) and has far too much description and not enough dialogue for my liking. The narrative also meanders and unless you've a burning interest in insects or the composition of snowflakes you're hardly likely to be enthralled by a great deal of the prose. I also found it difficult to warm to the main character, finding him as cold and detached as the Alaskan landscape he hailed from. I think that Doerr (a lecturer in creative writing no less) is either an author you'll really love or really hate, I think he's that divisive.
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