The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

This is a well-written book--especially as a first novel--the imagery is vivid and the sentences each so beautifully crafted that I often found myself pausing to re-read a passage just to savor them. But the plot, I felt, was a bit more simplistic in its urgent demand for movement forward.

Not that I mind a page-turner, mind you, but I did get a bit jarred by the plot device of the "ghost." While I continued to enjoy the book thereafter, I never was able to fully swallow that one for some reason. I almost would have enjoyed the book more, perhaps, if there were no such gimmicks and the earnings were more suited to the slow pace of the backwoods setting and the simple enjoyments of the dogs. I do admit that the dogs are well-developed as characters of their own in a meaningful way, and I did want to get me a dog immediately upon finishing.

In any case, a book for dog-lovers and lovers of a gripping, lush read alike.

I knew absolutely nothing at all about this book going in, and I was immediately drawn in by the beautiful writing. I loved the languid pacing, the descriptions, the characters, the long tangents into Edgar's family history and the training of the dogs. The setting -- a farm in rural Wisconsin -- has such a strong presence here, it puts this novel so strongly in place and yet also almost out of time. After the first third of this book I thought this was a magnificent book, one of the best I had read in years.

I was dismayed when the plot suddenly turned into Hamlet, because I thought the author had done such a good job drawing the story up to that point that borrowing from Shakespeare seemed like an unfortunate choice. For one thing, it limited the future options for the story to one path, and turned it into a gimmick. Up until that point it was a wonderful story of a boy and his relationship with his family and his dogs, and now it's a puzzle. Now I can match up the names and the scenes and draw analogies with Hamlet, one-to-one, like a game, rather than reading the book for its own inherent qualities. For me the book is absolutely at its strongest and most emotionally powerful when it diverges from the Hamlet story and is its own book, when it does not try to be a close analogy. And I really, really wish there had been more divergence. (especially with the ending.)

This was the best book I've read in a very long time, one that haunted me over and over again as I read it and that I can't stop thinking about now. But if this is a book about choices -- Edgar's choices, Trudy's choices, Claude's choices, the choices of the dogs -- then I hope that in Daniel Wroblewski's next book he chooses his own plot. Because I truly, truly look forward to that book.