Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
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4.0 • 8 Ratings
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Publisher Description
A brilliantly funny and bizarre novel . Alan is a middle-aged entrepreneur who has devoted himself to fixing up a house in a bohemian neighbourhood of Toronto. This naturally brings him into contact with the house full of students and layabouts next door, including a young woman who, in a moment of stress, reveals to him that she has wings -- wings, moreover, which grow back after each attempt to cut them off. Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother a washing machine, and among his brothers are a set of Russian nesting dolls.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's only natural that Alan, the broadminded hero of Doctorow's fresh, unconventional SF novel, is willing to help everybody he meets. After all, he's the product of a mixed marriage (his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine), so he knows how much being an outcast can hurt. Alan tries desperately to behave like a human being or at least like his idealized version of one. He joins a cyber-anarchist's plot to spread a free wireless Internet through Toronto at the same time he agrees to protect his youngest brothers (members of a set of Russian nesting dolls) from their dead brother who's now resurrected and bent on revenge. Life gets even more chaotic after he becomes the lover and protector of the girl next door, whom he tries to restrain from periodically cutting off her wings. Doctorow (Eastern Standard Tribe) treats these and other bizarre images and themes with deadpan wit. In this inventive parable about tolerance and acceptance, he demonstrates how memorably the outrageous and the everyday can coexist. FYI:Doctorow won the 2000 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
Customer Reviews
Inspiring
This book is amazing in a lot of ways. I’ve never read something so incredibly bizarre that still managed to suspend my disbelief so well and get me invested in the story. A lot of quirky details that don’t hit you right away, like the main character’s name.
My only real complaint, and why I left off the fifth star, is that the plot about the free wifi is just…boring in the midst of the rest of the story. I often skimmed those parts just to get to the next chapter about his childhood or the search for the missing brother.
Overall though, a very fascinating story and inspiring to a hobbyist writer as well, in that it made me realize I can write any strange story I want if I just commit and do it well, there is nothing too out there.
Whimsical and real and fantastic.
Whimsical and real and fantastic.