From Publishers Weekly
The majesty of nature, the meaning of courage, the redemptive power of love and the pathos of isolation—all are gracefully explored in Doerr's story of the price paid for a gift. So why does so little seem to happen in this beautiful, ponderous and sometimes monotonous first novel by the author of the exquisite collection
The Shell Collector? David Winkler has seen glimpses of the future ever since he was a boy. As a 32-year-old hydrologist in Anchorage, Alaska, he dreams of his future wife; soon they meet, fall in love and run away to Ohio, where she gives birth to their daughter, Grace. But when he dreams that he fails to save Grace from a flood, Winkler abandons wife and child, hoping to flee the future. He becomes a hermetic handyman on a Caribbean island near St. Vincent, befriended by a local family. The years pass until, emboldened by his surrogate family's grown daughter, a gifted marine biologist, Winkler realizes that he must embark on a journey to discover if Grace is alive. This is a lyrical tale tuned a bit too fine: Doerr's dreamy prose accords more attention to nature than character, so that Winkler, transfixed by the wonders of water and snowflakes but singularly unreflective about his actual life, is a frustratingly opaque protagonist. There are gorgeous moments here, but a stifling lack of story.
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From Booklist
As a boy in Anchorage, David Winkler began having strange dreams--which come true. Sometimes the dreams represent more mundane elements of life, such as luggage falling during an airplane flight; sometimes they signify momentous encounters, such as meeting the woman he would eventually marry. Winkler also dreamed things he did not want to come true--such as a man in a brown suit being killed by a bus. He dreamed that his newly born daughter would drown in a flood, and when the flooding began, Winkler fled, traveling thousands of miles, leaving his family and his comfortable life, hoping to stop his daughter's inevitable death. Twenty-five years later, he returns to Alaska to search for her and experiences an awakening of his own. As Winkler struggles to understand his dreams, he grows more and more alone, miserable, and hopeless. Winkler devastates his own life to a save another's--but in the process, he discovers that there is a saving grace in doing just that.
Michael SpinellaCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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