Absolutely lovely ( )

Beautiful book about unlikely relationships and the human need to connect. The primary setting is a small, seen-better-days apartment building in NYC with 4 tenants. They are a group of misfits and eccentrics but find healing and purpose through the story and each other. Thomas is a landscape, scientific artist who has suffered a stroke and doubts his ability to work. Adelaine is a manic-depressive young woman who collects artifacts from the past. Edward is a former stand-up comedian with a broken heart, still hilarious, but no longer motivated to laugh, and Paulie is a 33-yr. old man with Williams Syndrome, which was interesting to learn about and is lovingly cared for by his sister Claudia who becomes a "tenant" on his couch when she leaves her husband. They all begin to interact and band together around their land-lady, Edith who is slowly succumbing to dementia. Her sadistic son Owen appears and wants to send her to a home and take over the apt. building and evict them all to make it a multi-million dollar entity. However, the apt. is willed to Edith's long-lost daughter, Jenny, who "disappeared" in San Francisco in the 60s hippie culture. All that drama unfolds near the end, and until then it is more of an interior story, with lyrical prose and thoughtful disclosure of the tenants' individual pasts and how they slowly begin to come together and interact and pair up, almost like a dance. Loved it from start to finish! ( )

I knocked a little bit off my rating because of a rocky start which almost caused me to abandon the book. I'm glad I didn't, though, as I ended up being completely absorbed in this story of 4 tenants in a converted Brooklyn brownstone and their elderly landlady. They all have problems relating to the world and to other people, but they've each managed to build a home in this building and to forge tentative connections to each other. When that home is threatened, their individual responses and journeys take them to unexpected places, both literally and figuratively.

"Oh, no. No need to bring home with me, dear. I know what it feels like." (page 274)

4 stars ( )

DNF. Maybe I'm just tired but I found this a confusing mess, hopping backwards and forwards in the different characters' timelines and I just didn't care about any of them, so I bailed. ( )

Very good read, difficult to follow at times because of structure but very strong prose, descriptive writing, and a knockout at the end. ( )