Book Review #26 - Beautiful Ruins

My favorite book of the year, thus far.

I don't know quite what to say.  I should probably write about why I enjoyed it so much.  I guess because it is romantic. Or because it is colorful.  Perhaps, because it has freakishly fantastic characters.  who portray human motives with so much variety and truth.  Mostly, because it's unlike anything I've ever read.

This has a really big scope.  I could say it's about an Italian man who meets a Hollywood actress in 1962 and goes to America to look for her fifty years later.  I could also say it's about a young idealist who comes to realize that nothing in Hollywood is real.  At times, it's about a man who was part of The Greatest Generation who would never be great.  Other times, it's what must be salacious gossip about two dead stars: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and their infamous affair.  It's about drug addiction and death and loss of identity and infidelity and, in spite of all the seriousness, has real humor and love added in.  How does a book about so many thing end up being so great?  Jess Walters pulls all the threads together at the end and like a brand new contemporary symphony, something beautiful emerges out of all these dismal ruins.  Something I've never heard before.  And I loved it.