It was so lovely… and, in some ways, very heartbreaking. When I got to the last page I was almost sad it was over. I wish it would have had a bit more of the storyline to it. I usually like it when books get extremely deep into the nitty-gritties of everything, but Chopsticks skirts right along the top of Frank and Glory’s relationship giving you just enough to understand the story. I loved Chopsticks on a million different levels.

Somebody get the crash cart, because my heart is doing all sorts of weird things. In this stunningly moving novel told in photographs, pictures, and words, it’s up to the reader to decide what is real, what is imagined, and what has been madness all along…. Before long, Glory is unable to play anything but the song “Chopsticks.”īut nothing is what it seems, and Glory’s reality is not reality at all. The farther she falls, the deeper she spirals into madness. Brilliant and lonely, Glory is drawn to an artistic new boy, Frank, who moves in next door. As we flash back to the events leading up to her disappearance, we see a girl on the precipice of disaster. Now, as a teenager, Glory has disappeared. Her single father raised her as a piano prodigy, with a rigid schedule and the goal of playing sold-out shows across the globe. (: !!!Īuthor Website (Anthony* and Corral) | Goodreads | AmazonĪfter her mother died, Glory retreated into herself and her music. It is an exploration of the contemporary consequence of repressed male love meeting oppressive male power, pressures the ignored role of women in men’s “reincarnation,” and is a speedy, blackly comic condemnation of our current American blindness.!!! This entire review is a spoiler, so I suggest you skip this one if you haven’t read the book. Hijacking the maximalist spirit of William Gass and Thomas Pynchon, Enter the Aardvark is a ghost story, a love story, a political satire. and late nineteenth century Victorian England-during which we follow Titus Downing, the taxidermist who built the aardvark, and his lover who hunted her-the aardvark becomes a totem of the power of empathy, and of a kind of love which can endure through time.

Hurtling between present day Washington D.C. Wilson’s investigation into the contents of that delivery, a gigantic taxidermic aardvark, sets in motion a series of chaotic events, each escalating from the last, until Wilson finds himself at the mercy of America’s media machine, and in political ruin. It’s early one morning on a hot day in August, and congressman Alexander Paine Wilson (R-VA) is planning his first re-election campaign when he receives a FedEx delivery at his Washington townhouse.

Chopsticks by Jessica Anthony