This book is fantastic! I don’t even know how somebody can write this well. It’s a coming of age story and a picture of a moment in time and a place and an era.

One thing I don’t understand is why the one guy’s face is always blue. Not even men with dark facial hair and stubble have blue faces. Is it one of those things like where Homer sometimes calls things the wrong color? I actually think they just had different color words than we do. Maybe McCullers has a different idea what ‘blue’ means than I do?

Anyway, the characters are all just so impeccably balanced between the concreteness of actuality and some sort of historically symbolic meaning. It’s beautiful. Just a very, very, very well-written book.

She’s able to do the thing that great authors do where they use some phrase or circumstance to pinpoint an emotion that you’ve definitely had, but you didn’t even know you’d had it until she describes it. The lives of the characters are so much their own in their specificity that they become your own.

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