The thing I really noticed a loved about this book is how few words it took to make these complex, realistic feeling characters. I mean, you have story, backstory, thoughts, and interactions all spun out in, like, three sentences of text. How does he pack so much meaning and life into so few words? As someone who tries to write, that is something I so want to learn.

But that’s not a thing you can easily write an essay on. If I were assigned to write an essay on this book, I’d have to choose something other than “jamming each individual word and even letter with life and energy: how to do this,” because I’m not sure I could tease out all the ways that is done here. Instead, I could choose something like “knowing others: understanding and misunderstanding,” or “faith versus practicality,” or “the intertwinage of love and disrespect,” but I think I’d go smaller. My essay would be “ the magic of coincidence.” Paragraph 1: the examples of coincidences from each section of the book (I failed to take studious notes, but I feel like every major section of the book had a pulsing red coincidence on display. Paragraph two would talk about how these coincidences managed to (somewhat paradoxically) add realism to the story. Normally I’d be all ”Coincidence = artifice,” but in the examples I can think of right now, they managed to yield feelings of realism. Weird. Paragraph three: not yet designed. I mean, how can I know what to write there until I see what I say in the first paragraphs?