Book 30 - You Will Go Many Places / Oh Yes, You Will

Title: Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay Author: William Boyd Genre: Fictional historic autobio

I've started this sentence about a million times, simply because I just don't know what to say about this book that with fully communicate how it felt to read it. That's the thing, isn't it; we can never truly and completely explain a feeling to someone outside our own brain - and even being present in our own brain often isn't enough to understand what the heck we're feeling!

Okay. So this book is the fictional autobiography of the fictional photographer, Amory Clay. Pictures she supposedly took litter the pages, and the author used these found photographs to somewhat shape the novel. Very, VERY cool idea. Such a neat exercise - and a dying one, too, I would think. I was trying to drum up ideas of where I could even find hard-version photographs...family basements? Garage sales? Maybe the antique mall? Anyways...

The characters make this book. I mean, the plot is fantastic as well, but I'd say that the characters are really what draws the reader in. Amory herself is charismatic and self-aware, and the people she meets are fascinating and brought to life through Boyd's highly visual writing and Amory's matter-of-fact and detailed POV. There's definitely a theatrical quality to the characters - they don't quite pass for real, they're a bit too over the top - but this factor is uniformly present and executed in perfect balance, so it just makes for a rich, engrossing read.

Four words

Enthralling, complex, introspective, heart-aching

Rating: 🍷🍷🍷🍷🍷/ 5