Reviewed by: BigAl
Genre: Contemporary Fiction/Coming of Age
Approximate word count: 45-50,000 words
Availability
Click
on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or
Smashwords store
Author:
David Elder
is a lawyer who lives in Northern Michigan with his dog Sophie. Elder currently
has one other novel, Tashtego,
available.
For more,
visit the author’s website.
http://davidselder.com/
Description:
“Eric
Davis, as a young man just getting out of high school, works in a hardware
store in the small Northern Michigan town of Indian River. One night in a bar,
he accidently kills another young man by hitting him over the head with a beer bottle.
Eric Davis spends the next eight years in prison and then ships out in the
merchant marine where he sails the oceans and learns the love of the sea and
literature. He becomes a successful writer and decides to celebrate by visiting
South Florida.
After a disastrous
short marriage in Miami, he sobers up and decides that society is no place for
him. Eric Davis moves to a small island in the Caribbean, where he lives alone
on his beach with his three legged dog Nelson and a White Pelican. In his
solitude, he writes his stories and sends them to the United States for
publishing. Once a month, he and Nelson walk to the village where he spends
time drinking Red Stripe Beer and Canadian Club Whisky with his best friends
Raymond and May.
There comes
a night like no other. A ferocious hurricane strikes his island and the life of
Eric Davis is seemingly changed forever. In his depression he comes to learn,
by a magical turn of events, that no man is an island.
The
Gingerbread Man is the story, told in many years, of the emotional growth of
Eric Davis and the story of the life of his island and her people. In the end,
Eric Davis finds that run, run as hard as you can, sometimes you might just
catch the Gingerbread Man.”
Appraisal:
A typical
coming of age story relates the tale of a teen or young adult having an
experience that results in a transformation, typically from handling some
aspect of life like a kid to more like an adult. But life has more than two
seasons and I think there is a case to be made that the transformation the
protagonist Eric goes through in Gingerbread
Man is a coming of age story, just at a much older age. (In a secondary
story line, Eric’s daughter goes through a more traditional coming of age.)
I enjoyed
this read. Part of it was the coming of age or maturation process of a person
of more advanced age (I’d like to think we can all change for the better, no
matter how old), but also understanding the character of Eric. It was clear
early in the book that he had some skeletons in his closet, and understanding
what those were, how they had influenced his decisions and approach to life,
and watching him finally grow and get beyond them, all figured into the appeal
for me.
Format/Typo Issues:
No
significant issues.
Rating: **** Four stars
No comments:
Post a Comment