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Oliver Loving

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
"An exquisitely moving novel of sorrow, love, and the miracle of human connections." Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire One warm night Oliver Loving joins his classmates at the annual school dance, hoping for a glimpse of the girl he's long been in love with. But as music fills the gymnasium and students timidly approach the dancefloor, a young man enters with a gun, leaving five people dead and Oliver in a coma. A decade later, Oliver remains in limbo, wordless and paralyzed. His brother has long since fled. His father has turned to drink in the Texan desert. His town has withered, its people unable to forget. Only his mother, buoyed by the result of fresh neurological tests, holds onto the unshakeable hope that Oliver will soon wake up, and finally answer the questions that have slept with him for ten long years.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 23, 2017
      Block (The Storm at the Door) once again explores the ways in which debilitating illness breaks apart tenuous family bonds in his unsettling third novel. Set 30 miles north of the Mexico border in west Texas, where closed storefronts outnumber what’s in business and sentiment against “illegals” runs high, the book opens with a shooting at a school dance that leaves a popular teacher dead. Four students also die, including gunman Hector Espina Jr., the 21-year-old son of an undocumented Mexican sanitation worker. Seventeen-year-old Oliver Loving survives and is discovered on the floor covered in blood by his father, Jed, but he is in a vegetative state. Over the course of the next decade, the event takes its toll on the townspeople, especially Rebekkah Sterling, a crush of Oliver’s who escaped the shooting, and Oliver’s guilt-ridden family members. Jed descends into drunkenness; Oliver’s mother, Eve, maintains a myopic bedside vigil; and Oliver’s younger brother Charlie flees to New York, but never pulls his life together. When a new test shows signs that there is activity in Oliver’s brain, hope is tentatively restored, but at a steep cost for everyone involved. Block discloses the truth of what happened at the shooting by telling the story from different perspectives. Though the lead-up to the big reveal is perhaps too long to sustain itself, the book poses big questions about what constitutes a life worth living.

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  • OverDrive Read
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  • English

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