Operation Wandering Soul
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
National Book Award Finalist
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the forthcoming Bewilderment, an exquisitely rendered novel set in the pediatrics ward of a public hospital that examines the power, joy, and anguish of storytelling.
“If you have children or will have children, if you know children or can remember being a child, dare to read Operation Wandering Soul. . . [it] is bedtime reading for the future.” —USA Today
In the pediatrics ward of a public hospital in the heart of Los Angeles, a group of sick children is gathering. Surrogate parents to this band of stray kids, resident Richard Kraft and therapist Linda Espera are charged with keeping the group alive on make-believe alone. Determined to give hope where there is none, the adults spin a desperate anthology of stories that promise restoration and escape. But the inevitable is foreshadowed in the faces they’ve grown to love, and ultimately Richard and Linda must return to forgotten chapters in their own lives in order to make sense of the conclusion drawing near.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Powers, the certified (by a MacArthur grant) genius whose last novel was the much-admired Gold Bug Variations , continues to baffle and excite with his new book. Set in the pediatric ward of a big L.A. hospital in the apparently near future, it is a vast, impassioned fantasy-allegory about the plight of the world's children in a time of cynicism, corruption and easy destruction of life. The only recognizable adults are surgical resident Richard Kraft, desperately weary of trying to patch up the shattered lives and bodies of innocents, and therapist Linda Espera, who tries to instill hope through storytelling and play-acting. The two are deeply involved with a band of patients led by a precociously wise but hopelessly crippled Thai girl and a cynical, commanding boy whose rare disease has withered his body into that of an old man. Richard and Linda evoke for the children, or share with the reader, various factual and fabulous accounts of endangered children through the centuries: England during the blitz, the Pied Piper legend rendered amazingly contemporary, the abortive medieval Children's Crusade portrayed by a comic book, flashes of Peter Pan. As always with Powers, the verbal dexterity is amazing, but ultimately exhausting. He is quite capable of fluent sequential narrative, and readers will be relieved when he lapses into it after all the self-conscious brilliance and endlessly impressive allusion. Powers has a remarkable, virtuoso voice and much to say with it, but he desperately needs to curb his apparent need to show it off.
