Welcome to our first week as a combined Book Beginnings on Friday and Friday56 with a new name Friday Book Snippets. I am co-hosting this weekly blogging event with Olivia at Bemused & Bookish. You can link up at either of our sites but be sure to still visit and comment on other participant's blogs to increase our community.
Directions: Share two snippets (a sentence or short paragraph) from a) the book's opening and b) page 56 (or another page) from the book you are currently reading. No spoilers, please.
True confessions: I usually listen to audiobooks so figuring out if a quote is from page 56 (or any page) is very difficult for me. I just try to add some interesting snippet from somewhere in the book and I don't worry about the page number. I encourage you to think outside the page 56 parameter, too.
Title: London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe
Chapter 1 snippet, Opening:
After Zac Brettler died, his parents tried to decode the mystery of what happened to him, endlessly revisiting moments from his short life.
2nd snippet, page 25:
Education mattered a great deal to the Brettlers, as it did to their greater social milieu, in which families were quietly judged by other families over where their children went to school. Zac was old enough, and socially perceptive enough, to grasp this, and it must have stung. Eventually he found a place at another private school in London, called Mill Hill, and it was there that he started to change.
Summary: London Falling is the account of a family trying to make sense of the death of their nineteen-year-old son, Zac, when they discover that he had been living a double life. Prior to his death Zac had been pretending to be a rich Russian oligarch's son living alone in the city when he jumped into the Thames River. Was it a suicide or a murder? His secret life drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld which exists beneath the beautiful gilded city.
My thoughts: The book starts at Zac's death and then moves backwards to figure out what happened. The 2nd snippet needs a little context. Zac wasn't accepted to a very prestigious school where his older brother was attending. Joe, the older brother, was more academic than Zac, and it came as a blow when he was rejected. This is what must have stung. It was at the second school, Mill Hill, where Zac met rich children, some related to Russian oligarchs, and he started pretending he was one of them.
Patrick Radden Keefe is a master at writing narrative nonfiction. He met the family several years after Zac's death and they gave him full access to all of the police reports and information the family had gathered. And he was able to do some independent research to add to their insights of what probably happened during the last minutes of Zac's life. He also gave the reader insights into all the money which has been flowing into London since Asians were expelled from Uganda in the 1970s and the break up of the USSR in the late 1980s, early 1990s. This information never became overwhelming or boring, however, based on Keefe's storytelling skills.
My husband and I listened to the audiobook this past weekend and both of us were fully into the experience. We both rated it with 5 stars. It is an amazing, eye-opening story. I highly recommend it.
LinkUp:
-Anne
