Goodreads 5 Star Review for Clifford and Claudia


AnnLoretta’s Review
Dec 31, 2015

I dearly love to be knocked out of my expectations!

I was fortunate enough to get a copy of this constantly moving, unrelentingly challenging, bemusing, amusing, hurtful, charming novel as a special offer for my Kindle, just when I needed a break. And what an enjoyable book it is. It deserves your full attention, it demands your full attention. It's not a lightweight bit of fluff, it's too human (?) to be that.

Did Charles come from where he said he did? I don't know. Was the family he ended up with who they seemed to be? I don't know. But Charles is as convincing a character as I've met in a long time, there's never a moment when he's weakly portrayed, when the author wasn't living in his skin so that we could care about Charles, love with him, laugh with him, be in pain with him. When somebody else has read it, I'd love to talk about whether an alien needs to be an alien, or everybody we meet is an alien if we're going to be honest about it. The face we wake up with and look at in the bathroom mirror every morning is an alien, for that matter. And we can talk about whether he was off-planet or from a wrinkle in time. There's enough to tantalize, but not enough to answer. There are some wonderful, almost throw away, bits of "otherness," like a hot dog vendor, like a bottle floating in the Hudson, a bottle of ... nope, spoiler.

The same is true of the other characters, Claudia, Clifford, Cliffie, and, oh, Clara! I love Clara. I wish I had Clara in my life. I miss her. Strong, believable, multifaceted, all of them.

Those of you who read my reviews know that I don't do spoilers. All I can tell you is that this was one wonderful ride of the imagination and the heart. It took me a while to let go of reality, but what is reality, truthfully, but what we expect? What is reality but more of the same?

All right, one spoiler. Know a great pizza shop? Not good, great. Put their number on speed dial. You're going to need it once or twice...

EDIT: I always edit. Do you know what I love about this book? Its immediacy. The insistence of the language, the flurry of the flour and bubbling of the cheese and herbs in the kitchen, the miasma of Manhattan, the absolute eventual reality of Paterson NJ, the trueness of the characters to themselves, all the questions in my mind, things to feed my interior life, the possibility of this, the maybe of that. And that Charles is so utterly convincing, so open, so loving, so giving. This is a book you can float in with your eyes closed, long after you've finished it, safe, and sense that kind beings you can't begin to imagine are swimming and living their lives all around you, living their lives in the same water that's licking at your skin, and you're just content to know they're there. And they feel the same.

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