Loved it. Love her. ( )

Emily St. John Mandel is a clever writer. The plot builds slowly but steadily, with built in expectations along the way.

Each flashback comes at just the right place to show something the reader needs to know about a character. And every character, even the few minor ones, seems to be there for a reason.

I put this book on a to-read list, somehow thinking it was science fiction, but by the time I realized it wasn't I was into it and happily read to the end. ( )

Once upon a time, in far more primitive days, people connected to the internet through 56k modems. Remember those? Waiting for a picture to download could try the patience of typical modern man. An ingenious approach to dealing with this problem was interlacing. Rather than downloading from top to bottom strictly sequentially, an interlaced image was divided up into strips 8 pixels high and downloaded onto your screen in passes. The first pass downloaded only the top line of each strip, the second pass downloaded another line, the next pass downloaded more lines, and the final pass downloaded the rest. In this way each section of the image was progressively made clearer and fully visible through multiple passes through it: a fuzzy whole made sharp while you waited for the complete image.

The Singer's Gun reminded me of watching one of these picture files download back in those days before broadband. It is a novel that does not progress from start to finish along a chronological line, each step along the timeline clearly presented before moving along. Instead we see a fuzzy outline of the whole, and take more passes back through sections of the story, making them gradually clearer, and in fact changing our perception of the image. It's a great alternative way to shape a novel, and it works terrifically well with this book.

Other than that, I'll note that in her second novel Mandel has again created a central character who finds himself living outside the bounds of the law, but forced there more or less unwillingly out of circumstance. As in her debut novel Last Night in Montreal, it's just that there were two options presented, and as it happened the only option really to be taken was the one that leads to being chased by an officer of the law. ( )

This was my first Mandel read. While reading, I felt very distanced from the characters; as a foggy veil between us. Some words that others used to describe this book: noir, suspense, and thriller. I think those words are too strong for this book. Words I might use: interesting, nebulous, cloudy. This is the story of Anton, whose parents buy and sell stolen plumbing and garden supplies and his niece, who smuggles people into the U.S. Anton is not the angel, he got a diploma from Harvard by posing as an ex- student (who had really died). All was going peachy for Anton until a background investigation of all employees at his place of employment discovered that Anton's diploma was not genuine. This discovery sets the course of the book. Mandel wrote chapters that were sometimes twice removed from the previous one in both time and person. This reader had to really focus to determine which person the chapter was focusing on and then determine if the time period was before or after the previous chapter or two. For a person who wants a more linear story, this could be confusing. I was only lost once! The ending of the book reminded me of Tartt's The Goldfinch. According to the reviews of others, I understand this was Mandel's second novel and much improvement has been made. 267 pages ( )

Oh, that I could write good book reviews in order to do this book justice. I simply love her voice, the elements of melancholy and the understanding of how surrealism can fit into any life. ( )