Review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Published: William Morrow & Co., 2013

Awards Won: Locus Fantasy Award

Awards Nominated: Nebula, Mythopoeic and World Fantasy Awards

The Book:

“Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.” ~goodreads.com

I am a fan of Neil Gaiman, so I happily anticipated reading this book when it came out, even more so when it was clearly well received by others.  The main reason I delayed so long in reading it was the price (it was $12.99 for an e-book of less than 200 pages--it is a bit less now), and my fear that it was going to be a story drenched in existential dread and emptiness.  On the second point, It really isn’t, and I’m happy that I didn’t let that fear deter me from finally reading it.

My Thoughts:

The Ocean at the End of the Lane exists in an interesting intersection between the innocence of a child’s perspective and the darkness of an adult’s fantasy story.  I think it could be enjoyed by a child, with parental supervision (there is some disturbing content), but that it is targeting an adult audience.  I feel like it would best be understood by an adult looking back at childhood, like the protagonist. I enjoyed that the story really was unequivocally a fantasy, not just using fantastical elements for the purpose of allegory or metaphor.The supernatural forces that were unleashed exposed the desires and flaws of the people around the protagonist, but their reactions and emotions felt grounded in reality. Thus, even though this is a book about immortals, interloping inhuman creatures, and an ocean that fits in a pond, there is still a relatable emotional core.   

The protagonist as a young boy has a very open, naive view of a complicated and often bewildering world. His young, fluid sense of reality allows him to accept the magic that enters his life as easily as the non-magical events. One thing that I hadn’t really considered about a child’s reality is their isolation and relative helplessness.  The protagonist has very little power over his circumstances, and his distress is often dismissed by those who do.  It must be terrifying to a child to realize that the people who have life-and-death power over him are not necessarily worthy of his trust.  However, though he is at the mercy of the adults in his life, he still does the best he can as he and the Hempstocks desperately try to right his world.

I felt like the novel had the beauty and simplicity of a fairy tale, but one that is in touch with modern sadness and cruelty. Some of the griefs of the protagonist’s childhood were very familiar to me, and so it was easy to see fragments of myself in him.  This endeared him to me as a character, though I wonder if it will work as well for people with more recent childhoods-- the world has changed a lot in the past twenty years. I also loved the Hempstocks, and I think that the sense of safety and comfort they exuded helped to keep things from feeling too bleak.  The short novel felt very balanced and self-contained from beginning to end, a lovely gem of a story to enjoy for a brief time. I don’t think there is a message that is easy to sum up, but there is plenty to think about.  Out of all of it, I think my favorite line was from one of the Hempstocks, who tells the protagonist, “You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.” (p.142)

My Rating: 4/5

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a very short novel that tells of a young boy, through his memory as an adult.  It feels to me like a book about childhood targeted to an adult audience.  Though the protagonist is very young through most of the novel, he faces situations that are far darker and more frightening than one would expect a boy his age to handle.  The story is an unusual fantasy, and the supernatural elements are all connected to the three Hempstock women.  To me, it seemed like a modern fairy tale, though the tale’s grief and terror is balanced with some measure of safety and comfort. I enjoyed reading it, and I would recommend it to other fans of Gaiman’s work.

Review: The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson

The New Moon’s Arms by Nalo Hopkinson

Published: Warner Books, 2007

Awards Nominated: Nebula, John W. Campbell Memorial, and Mythopoeic Awards

The Book:

“The New Moon's Arms is a mainstream magical realism novel set in the Caribbean on the fictional island of Dolorosse. Calamity, born Chastity, has renamed herself in a way she feels is most fitting. She's a 50-something grandmother whose mother disappeared when she was a teenager and whose father has just passed away as she begins menopause.

With this physical change of life comes a return of a special power for finding lost things, something she hasn't been able to do since childhood. A little tingling in the hands then a massive hot flash, and suddenly objects, even whole buildings, lost to her since childhood begin showing up around Calamity.

One of the lost things Calamity recovers is a small boy who washes up on the shore outside her house after a rainstorm. She takes this bruised but cheerful 4-year-old under her wing and grows attached to him, a process that awakens all the old memories, frustrations and mysteries around her own mother and father. She'll learn that this young boy's family is the most unusual group she's ever encountered—and they want their son back.” ~WWEnd.com

Nalo Hopkinson is an author I’d whose work I’ve been meaning to check out for a while, so I was happy to see that The New Moon’s Arms fits nicely into one of my 2014 reading challenges.  This is the first book I’ve read by Hopkinson, but I doubt it will be the last.

My Thoughts:

The New Moon’s Arms is a story in part about a woman’s difficult transition from youth to middle age. Calamity (born Chastity) is entering menopause, but she is still clinging desperately to her youth and to the life history that has defined her.  Not only is her sense of identity shifting, the world in which she was a young woman is also beginning to no longer exist.  From the long-ago destruction of her childhood home and loss of her mother, to the recent death of her father, to the new perspectives of a younger generation, everything is disappearing and changing. She must come to terms with the mysteries and painful memories that fill her past before she can move forward into a future that threatens to leave her behind.  Part of this digging up the past comes through her re-awakened ‘finding’ ability, which causes lost artifacts of her childhood to resurface, and part is through interacting with the people that have caused her to become the person she is in the present.

While Calamity’s life has shaped her into an energetic, fiery woman with a sharp sense of humor, it has also left her with some glaring personality flaws.  From the beginning, she comes across as very immature, impulsive, and prejudiced, with a level of self-absorption that prevented her from seeking to understand anyone outside herself.  At her best, she can be charming, but at her worst, she is a trial to the people who attempt to love her.  Her rescue of the sea child reflects her best and worst qualities—she is a woman who would care for an abandoned 4-year-old with barely a second thought, but her lack of capability or desire to understand others prevents her from even learning the kid’s name.  Though I can’t say Calamity is exactly likeable, I thought that her progression as a heroine felt realistic.  People don’t change overnight, and Calamity’s growth as a person is an inconstant and slow process.

On a last point, I really loved the language of The New Moon’s Arms, and the vivid physicality of the descriptions of the islands where Calamity lived.  Everyone in the story spoke with a local patois, which gave a pleasant rhythm to their speech, and Calamity’s voice, in particular, gave the narration a casual, conversational style. I am wholly unfamiliar with Carribbean speech patterns, but I thought that the narration and dialogue both felt very natural and easy for a reader to follow. I am curious to read Hopkinson’s other novels, and to see how they are similar or differ from the style of The New Moon’s Arms.

My Rating: 4/5

The New Moon’s Arms is a story of growing older and of having to face the person you’ve allowed yourself to become.  Calamity has not had an easy life, but she is a difficult person to love. Calamity’s story in told a distinct and interesting voice, and the weaknesses of her character are shown with an unflattering honesty.  Calamity was not always an especially likeable character, and the fantastical elements reflected her tendency to cling to the past and her self-absorption.  She was an engaging flawed heroine, though, and I was eager to see her find some way to grow into a life where she could be happy. I enjoyed A New Moon’s Arms, and will look forward to reading more of Hopkinson’s work in the future.   

Review: A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar

Published: Small Beer Press, 2013

Awards Nominated: Nebula Award

Awards Won: John W. Campbell Award for Best New Author, World Fantasy Award

The Book:

“Jevick, the pepper merchant's son, has been raised on stories of Olondria, a distant land where books are as common as they are rare in his home. When his father dies and Jevick takes his place on the yearly selling trip to Olondria, Jevick's life is as close to perfect as he can imagine. But just as he revels in Olondria's Rabelaisian Feast of Birds, he is pulled drastically off course and becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl.

In desperation, Jevick seeks the aid of Olondrian priests and quickly becomes a pawn in the struggle between the empire's two most powerful cults. Yet even as the country shimmers on the cusp of war, he must face his ghost and learn her story before he has any chance of becoming free by setting her free: an ordeal that challenges his understanding of art and life, home and exile, and the limits of that seductive necromancy, reading.” ~WWEnd.com

A Stranger in Olondria is Sofia Samatar’s debut fantasy novel, and she has also published short fiction,poetry, essays and reviews. There are some mild spoilers ahead, which I couldn’t avoid while discussing the novel. 

My Thoughts:

A Stranger in Olondria is very beautifully and descriptively written, and seems to carry love for the written word.  Pretty much every sentence in the novel is written with a sense of poetry, which is lovely but can sometimes feel a little overwhelming.  For instance, here is a random sentence describing Jevick rushing to a friend’s aid, with a pretty description that kind of obscures the action:

“I hurried past arched entryways where anxious statues peered out with white eyes, emerging at last into the central hall where the moonlight, flung through the doorway, set illusory crystals in the checkered floor.” ~ p. 208 

In addition to the poetic slant of the prose, there’s also a sense of historical foundation to the world through written fictional documents. Jevick knows most of the world initially through the books his exiled Olondrian tutor had taught him to read, and he constantly references or quotes the classic works of his world throughout his travels. While this combination of description and history makes for some impressive writing, it also seems to remove the sense of immediacy from the story, even in dramatic situations, which makes it feel like the story is advancing very slowly.

The novel is also mostly narrated from the point of view of Jevick, who seems to be detached from the story that is happening to and around him.  Perhaps it is just the style of Jevick’s voice, but even though he sometimes explains his feelings, I never felt like I understood his mind.  Sometimes he would make decisions that seemed baffling to me, like willfully choosing to do or not do something with the full knowledge that it would lead directly to his own suffering.  However, the second major character of the story, the ghost Jissavet, is nearly the opposite.  Her story felt deeply emotional and brutally honest, and was by far the most engaging section of the novel for me.  I think that the contrast between the voices of the two characters may have been intended to illustrate the contrast between their two worlds of literate and oral culture.

Among other things, it is the conflict between these two kinds of culture that the story explores. In both cultures, people use stories as a framework to understand their lives, for better or for worse.  In Jissavet’s culture, people are heavily influenced by superstition, while a Olondrian culture places more value on written histories.  Jevick loves the books through which he has been taught about the world, but he is slowly forced to recognize the privilege and oppressive power of the literate culture he has embraced.  Jissavet, on the other hand, must confront the fact that she is dead and, in her culture, will be forgotten.  Through her insistence that Jevick record her life story, though, she can gain a kind of immortality.  I don’t think the story had a moral, exactly, but was more concerned with showing the happiness and suffering of all sides and how these different cultures interact.  In view of these considerations, I loved the way the story ended.  I felt that the meaning behind Jevick’s final actions provided a resolution that gave a sense of meaning to the examination of the two kinds of culture, but one that still did not judge their relative worth.

My Rating: 4/5

A Stranger in Olondria is an unusual novel, but one that is written beautifully and with a rich sense of history for its fictional world.  The novel is filled with love for the written word, but also explores the troubled interaction between literate and oral cultures.   The plot is extremely slow, and the main character, Jevick, felt a little too detached from his own story for me to be very engaged with his experiences.  My interest picked up with the introduction of the ghost’s story, which felt much more immediate and emotional, and I loved the conclusion of the story.  This is a novel that had a slow start for me, but I enjoyed it quite a lot by the end.

New Voices: The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

Published: HarperCollins, Blue Door (2013)

Awards Nominated: Nebula Award

Awards Won: Mythopoeic Award

Helene Wecker published her debut novel, The Golem and the Jinni, in April of last year, and it has already garnered quite a lot of positive attention. In a section after the end of the novel, Wecker describes the story of how this novel came to be.  While she started her career working as a writer in marketing and communications, she realized that not trying her hand at becoming a fiction writer might one day be her biggest regret.  The Golem and the Jinni is a work of many years, inspired at first by her and her husband’s family histories as children of Jewish and Arab American immigrants, respectively. An interesting Q&A about the novel can be found here, on her website.

I would describe The Golem and the Jinni, which takes place in late-1800s New York, as a pleasantly sedate story.  The physical and cultural setting felt very solid to me, and I enjoyed the portrayal of daily city life from various perspectives.  At first I was a little confused at the patient care with which some seemingly minor characters were introduced, typically with a life history explaining how they came to be the person they are today.  However, all of these minor characters eventually had a role to play in the story, as the pieces slowly fell into place for the larger plot that tied the story together.  I enjoyed how neatly everything came together in the end, though the climax risked feeling a little too rushed, and the coincidences a little too convenient.

From my perspective, the greatest strength of the story is in its exploration of the characters and their relationships with one another.  Aside from the supernatural entities of the title, the communities they inhabited were also filled with memorable characters. There are really too many to list here, but some of my favorites were the kind, troubled Rabbi who took the golem in, and the afflicted former doctor known to others in the Syrian neighborhood as “Ice Cream Saleh”.  Even the villain, though he was portrayed as irredeemable, had understandable motivations and was capable of good as well as evil.  Having so many distinct, believable characters helped to give the world an open, expansive feeling, and I felt that their presence also helped to define the communities that Wecker set out to portray.

While I appreciated the side characters, I think that the most memorable characters for me were the golem, Chava, and the jinni, Ahmad.  The two characters were wonderfully complementary, but also had enough in common that it seemed natural for them to gravitate toward one another.  For instance, they are both ‘born’ into a community where they mostly belong, but where they still feel like an outsider.  I don’t have the experience of being the child of an immigrant, but I wondered whether that last might have been meant to portray the sense of belonging/not-belonging that someone in that situation might feel.

Beyond the similarities of their situations, their personalities are balanced like yin and yang.  Chava is able to sense the needs of others, so she is hyper-aware of her connection to the people around her and of the effects on others of her every action and word.  Ahmad, on the other hand, is used to thinking of himself as separate, and rarely considers what effects his actions might have on anyone.  Chava doubts her own decisions and longs for guidance, while Ahmad typically disregards the guidance of others and longs to direct his own path.  Even their situations are inverted: Chava is a being that is designed for servitude, but who finds herself unexpectedly free, while Ahmad is a being that is intended to be free, who finds himself unexpectedly bound.  These differences in situation and temperament led to some very interesting discussions about social responsibility, free will, and religion, where both of them were able to learn from the perspective of the other. Their experiences, both separate and together, helped them both to grow beyond what either might have expected at the beginning of the story.

Altogether, I think The Golem and the Jinni is an award-worthy novel, and a truly excellent debut from a new talent.  The story is a rather slow-moving one, focused largely on the daily life of two supernatural beings in Jewish and Syrian communities of late-1800’s New York City.  The novel is also shaped by a larger, magical plot that slowly surfaces as the novel progresses, in which all the characters eventually play a part.  However, I think my favorite part of the novel was in the strong development of its many characters, and in their interactions with one another and their communities. I look forward to seeing what Helene Wecker will publish next!

Review: The Famished Road by Ben Okri

The Famished Road by Ben Okri

Published : Jonathan Cape, 1991

Series : Book 1 in the Abiku Trilogy

Awards : Man Booker Prize

The Book :

"Our country is an abiku country. Like the spirit-child, it keeps coming and going. One day it will decide to remain." ~p.478 The Famished Road

“Azaro is an abiku, a spirit child that does not want to be born.  Abiku make pacts with their spirit companions to not leave the perfect happiness of the spirit world for the difficulty and sorrow of a mortal life.  When an abiku is forced to be born, he typically returns to the spirit world as soon as possible.  Azaro, however, chose to stay, in order to bring happiness to the woman that would be his mother.

Though his spirit companions call to him, though the road he sees ahead of him is a thankless, painful struggle, he continues to refuse to abandon his mortal life.  Azaro lives his life of hardship with his loving parents in a poor Nigerian community.  Caught between life and death, Azaro has a connection to the spirit world, and the spirits plague his life as surely as the more mundane problems of hunger, violence, and political corruption.” ~Allie

 I read this novel as a part of the Outside the Norm reading group at WWEnd.com.  As a result, a lot of this review is informed by this discussion (beware of spoilers).  I’ve never read anything by Okri before, and this was honestly nothing like what I expected. As a random side note, apparently the Radiohead song“Street Spirit (Fade Out)” was inspired by TheFamished Road. 

My Thoughts:

I haven’t had all that much experience with magical realism, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Okri’s novel.  The supernatural elements, which could be better termed the spiritual elements, were seamlessly intertwined with reality.  The spiritual content seemed to follow an animist tradition, and it mostly involved visions and spiritual journeys.  For example, Azaro often had visions of various spirits, and they sometimes even physically interacted with him.  Also, whenever anyone became sick, their loved ones went to great lengths to lure the soul back from the land of spirits into its physical body.  Both Azaro’s visions and the spirit journeys of the sick and dying were treated as if they were a normal and natural part of life.  Sometimes, the interpretations of these spiritual experiences were relatively clear, but at other times I felt like some deeper meaning was eluding me.  While the spiritual segments were often very poetically written, I couldn’t always see the relevance to the story.  I feel like this might be a novel that would benefit from more extensive study.  

I was equal parts impressed and frustrated by the protagonist, the young child Azaro.  He seemed very realistic as a child, and early in the novel he simply observed most of his world with little understanding or interpretation. He had very little power to influence or change much in his life. Like many children, he also rarely reflected on his own actions, and would often simply answer the questions of adults with, “I don’t know.”  In terms of the narrative, though, having such an incommunicative, powerless protagonist began to grate after a while.  I had hoped that he would grow throughout the book and become a more active participant in his society.  While he does age up from infancy to around 10-12 years of age, he never really loses his childlike passivity.  

Most of what Azaro provided was a highly detailed view into a poverty-stricken community in post-colonial Nigeria. The physical elements of his world, such as the nearby forest, Azaro’s family’s small, rat-infested apartment, and the local bar were brought to painful life through Okri’s descriptive prose.  Even more, though, the myriad people of the community were shown clearly, with all their dreams, hopes, and flaws.  Azaro’s father dreams big but plans poorly, throwing his money into parties and alcohol.  His mother works desperately hard, but can’t help the creeping despair that her life will never be what she once imagined.  The local bar owner, Madame Koto, aspired to material success above all things, though she was not as single-minded as her legend might make one believe.  On a larger scale, Azaro saw how the people of his community behaved en masse, how they were manipulated by corrupt politics, how they were divided by petty feuds, and how they felt that their little corner of the world didn’t really matter at all to those outside.  I found it to be a stunningly vivid portrayal of poverty and the way people coped with their lives.

While the writing was beautiful, and the setting and characters were complex and fascinating, the actual plot was frustratingly non-traditional.  The story never appeared to be leading anywhere, or building up to any kind of major event.  It simply continued, as Azaro’s life and his family and friends’ lives did.  The narrative was very cyclical, and even repetitive, portraying people facing an endless series of small successes and failures that left them in essentially the same place.  While I realize this was the point, the absence of direction in the plot left the story feeling like something of a slog. As a representation of the ideas embedded in the novel, however, the structure of the story makes a lot of sense.

My Rating : 4/5

The Famished Road, is an impressive work of literature.  The novel gave a very thorough look at Azaro’s poor Nigerian community, and the animist-style spiritual elements were integrated seamlessly into his reality.  It was interesting to see a story written from a child’s perspective, but the limitations that placed on Azaro’s ability to fully engage with his world in an active way were frustrating.  The lack of a traditional plot sometimes made reading feel like a trudge.  One of the central ideas was the never-ending struggle that defined life, and this was shown by the cyclical, repetitive stories of daily successes and failures that constituted the novel.  While I can see why this work of magical realism has many fans, I don't think it will become one of my favorites.

Review: Among Others by Jo Walton

Among Others by Jo Walton

Published : Tor, 2011

Awards Won : Nebula Award, Hugo Award, British Fantasy Society Award (Holdstock Award as of this year)

Awards Nominated : Locus Fantasy Award

The Book:

“As a child growing up in Wales, Morwenna played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins. But her mind found freedom in the science fiction novels that were her closest companions. When her half-mad mother tried to bend the spirits to dark ends, Mori was forced to confront her in a magical battle that left her crippled--and her twin sister dead.

Fleeing to a father whom she barely knew, Mori was sent to boarding school in England-a place all but devoid of true magic. There, she tempted fate by doing magic herself, in an attempt to find a circle of like-minded friends. But her magic also drew the attention of her mother, bringing about a reckoning that could no longer be put off….” ~WWend.com

I’m getting the feeling my blog is going to fill up with a lot of Jo Walton titles in the coming years!  She’s a very talented writer, and I love how each of her novels feels so different from the ones before.  Among Others seems like a book that was written with a specific audience in mind. As someone who falls (at least partially) into that audience, I found a lot to love in Among Others.   

My Thoughts:

The story of Among Others is told through Morwenna’s journal. The novel was convincing as the journal of a teenage girl, but it was also satisfying as a work of fiction.  I think this is a very difficult balance to achieve.  It was well written, but it felt like the voice of a teenager. There was a certain necessary detachment from the events of the story, but it was compensated by the closeness to the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings.  Telling the story through Mori’s journal also resulted in a slow, meandering plot that was more like a ‘slice-of-life’ story than a traditional narrative structure. 

Mori’s journal felt at times like a teenager’s SF review blog, a mild teen drama, or a fantasy story.  I think it is the first of these points that is the most polarizing.  Mori spends most of her time reading, so she comments constantly on the science fiction novels she consumes.  Later in the story, she even recounts discussions about various authors or works that took place in the book club she joins.  For readers who aren’t well-read in 1960s/1970s science fiction, I can see how this might really bog down the story.   I’ve read a fair amount of the works Mori mentioned,  so I think that I fit into the target audience for these portions of the book.   However, even I have to admit that Mori’s comments about the works were often not particularly important for the story.  Her love for the novels—and her ability to connect with others through that love—was central, but the specific name-dropping seemed mostly present to invoke nostalgia in the reader. 

In addition to her love of science fiction, Mori’s belief in magic shapes her world.  I thought Walton’s treatment of the fantasy elements in Among Others was especially interesting and poetic.  There are no fireballs, magic wands, and magical-lightning-filled showdowns.  Walton’s magic is, as Mori would say, “always deniable.”  Even if a spell appears to have worked, it would do so through ordinary means, leaving always the possibility that the success was merely a coincidence.  Mori sees and talks with fairies, but they can only be seen if one already believes in them.  This mundane treatment of magic makes it possible to see the story either as fantastical, or as the tale of a highly imaginative girl.  I liked how skillfully the story walked between the two interpretations, so that it is never completely clear whether magic really does exist or whether Mori just uses her belief in it to give a meaningful shape to the events of her life.

In addition to the science fiction discussions and quiet fantasy elements, the character of Morwenna is another determining factor for the audience of the novel.  Since this is a story of her daily life, told through her journal, the entire story revolves around her thoughts, her opinions, and her experiences.  I think that it might be difficult to become invested in the story if one did not feel any kind of kinship towards Mori.  I doubt that many people can relate to her specific situation—being crippled in the event that killed your twin sister and then being shipped off to an English boarding school.  However, I think a lot of science fiction fans could probably identify with her struggle to find a group of people who shared her interests.  I particularly connected with Mori’s social problems at her new boarding school.  I know what it feels like to move into a closed system of friendships, and find that no one is particularly interested in involving the “weird new girl”.  Despite Mori’s problems, her narrative remained refreshingly low in self-pity, and I enjoyed getting to know her over the 200-odd pages of Among Others.

My Rating: 4.5/5

Among Others is an unusual book targeted towards a specific audience. The story, told through Morwenna’s journal, is a kind of slice-of-life fantasy story about a teenage science fiction fan searching for a community in which she feels she belongs.  Along the way, Mori constantly discusses the many science fiction novels she’s read (mostly 1960s/1970s SF), in a way that will likely be charming to some readers and off-putting to others.  The magic in the story is “always deniable”, where successful spells can easily be explained away by coincidence.  I loved how this created an ambiguity about whether the magic was real, or it was just the frame Mori used to make sense of her life.  Despite differences in the specific circumstances, this story resonated well with me, and I think it will also resonate with many other fans of science fiction.