Are We, We Are, Are We, We Are The Waiting (40/52)

So Juliet, Naked was a winner. And then the next book I read, Await Your Reply, was I think the best novel I read all year. Didn't hurt that I read it on a weekend retreat in Santa Cruz, leisurely, in the sunshine, in view of the Pacific Ocean.

The story starts off with a bang - a man rushes his son to a hospital, in the middle of the night, somewhere in the Midwest (Michigan? I think). The son's severed hand is in a cooler in the backseat. 

Then, before you find out what exactly is going on here (how did the hand get severed, fer Chrissakes?), the next chapter follows a young girl in Ohio, who is leaving her small town with her lover, the man who was her history teacher in the past year. 

In chapter three, we are driving north through Canada with Miles, who is trying to find his long-lost twin brother. 

And then we're thrown back into the life of the son from chapter one, but there's no mention of severed hands, so we must assume this is earlier in the timeline.

I really liked how I got set down in the middle of the story, catching glimpses here and there, without fully knowing what was going on. Slowly, the three strands of narrative come together, but it took me all the way to the end of the book to really get it - which was perfect. GREAT payoff. I think I must read it a second time, now that I've seen the tale unfold all the way to the end.