I feel like I could write an essay about this book. It’s about the life of a fictional boy, Harrison Shepherd, who doesn’t have the nicest of childhoods but finds a family of sorts in his late teens working in Mexico in the household of real-life artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. From there he becomes employed by the real-life Russian exile Lev Trotsky, who is fleeing persecution from Stalin. I knew nothing about these historical figures before so this was a real eye opener for me. Trotsky becomes the father Shepherd never had so when he is finally assassinated Shepherd is devastated. The second half of the book is about the long reaching effect of Lev’s death on Shepherd, after he returns to the US, and how his association with Communists in Mexico, the only family he ever had, comes back to haunt him in the McCarthy era USA. But there are so many themes in this book, set in the 1930s and 40s, that are so relevant today. A major theme is ‘the lacuna’, a phrase used to mean ‘the gap or hole in the story’ and how we tend to ‘fill in the gaps’ ourselves of the parts of people’s lives we don’t know or understand, assuming things that aren’t true, but they become true in our heads. And that this is also done on a larger scale by the media, where outright lies are told about people’s private lives, which automatically become truth because they’ve been published. Another major theme that gave me so much to think about is the USA as land of the ‘free’ - really? There are references to the hundreds of first and second generation Japanese, Germans and Italians put into internment camps during WW2 and then the persecution of anyone with any association with Russia (who was an ally during the war but who was suddenly the enemy after the war) or ever had anything to do with Communism, through the McCarthy witch-hunt. So land of the ‘free’ unless you’re from a country we’re currently enemies with. The America of the 1940s sounds like one of fear and distrust, where being ‘unAmerican’ was a crime. Ring any bells?