The forgetfulness of sugar

Edgar felt confused. He wanted a cookie, the forgetfulness of sugar. [...] Life was complicated, and dangerous. Edgar needed a teacher. Someone, like the aliens, who could extend long fingers into his brain and adjust the dials, rearrange the chaos of dots until the picture was marvelous and clear, and with no effort at all you would understand why you'd been born in a place where the rain of information never ceased, and where every person was a baffling conceit.

I'm not sure why I accepted a review copy of Edgar and Lucy, by Victor Lodato.

If I'd known more about what it was about, I might not have picked it up. (I remember thinking something similar about Lodato's first novel, Mathilda Savitch.) I don't naturally gravitate toward books that deal explicitly with grief, childhood trauma, family secrets, tragedy. (I don't seem to mind when those themes are implicit, subtly woven into the fabric of a story, but when a book is about overcoming a challenge, I tend to look elsewhere.)

Edgar is an eight-year-old albino boy, Lucy's his mom, his father's gone, dead, suicide. Lucy's got a limp and she drinks too much. They live with Edgar's grandmother, who has her own ghosts to deal with, until she dies. And then Edgar goes missing.

Upon starting in, I wasn't convinced I was prepared to invest my time in 500+ pages, but Lodato's writing is hugely compelling, and comes a point you have to know how it ends. I would've cut a few pages, but in the end I was quite satisfied to have spent a rainy day last weekend blanketed with this book.

Excerpt.