My kind of contest
The Globe and Mail has a contest that has caught my attention. They run part of a recent novel for five days and on the last day readers are invited to submit reviews. This routine will go on for six weeks. At the end of each week, ten reviews are drawn and the winners each get $100 gift certificates for books. As if this wasn’t exciting enough, there’s a grand prize of $5000, just for books.
I spent a good half hour yesterday planning what books I’d buy with five grand. I’d start with all those big reference books that you should have, but are too expensive. Then Martha mentioned the full, 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. That’s $2000 right there. The contest rules say something about “some restrictions apply.” I’ll worry about those when the time comes.
A closer reading of the rules revealed that the actual review is not that important. Winners are chosen purely through the draw. I’m not really encouraged to write more than “It was neat,” and choose a star rating for the novel excerpt. But since I have those literary leanings, I did actually write a review. Not my finest though. I’m more worried about the skill-testing math question that winners’ of the draw have to answer unaided and correctly. There’s a time limit too.
The review itself follows.
You would think abandonment would shake up a person. At the start of John Irving’s Until I Find You, a flighty, soon-to-be father bolts across the Atlantic before his son is born. Of the mother, there’s no mention of tears, resentment or hatred toward the negligent dad. The reader only knows of her determination to track him down. She’s Scottish so that might explain her emotional austerity. Regardless, I’m suspicious.
In the opening of Irving’s book, the author’s skill is almost enough to distract one from suspicion. As a writer who goes for plot above psychological meandering, Irving sweeps the reader right into the lives of four-year old Jack and his mother Alice as they follow the trail of William Burns. Irving tells the tale with judicious details. Alice is quite engaging as a choirgirl/tattoo artist. Jack’s nightmares spawned from a man with a completely tattooed face and a cemetery with windblown human ashes make him quite endearing. Irving’s wry humour also moves the story along. He tempers Alice’s romantic, flower-filled memories of her first meeting with William with the observation that it was the aforementioned ashes that were behind the thriving crocuses and daffodils.
Still, all of Irving’s writerly devices can’t mask that something else lies behind Alice’s determination. But that’s probably the point.