Leanne Ogasawara at the Pittsburgh Review of Books:
One of the most anticipated books of the year, Dave Eggers’ new novel Contrapposto was twenty years in the making and draws on the author’s own background as a trained visual artist before he turned primarily toward writing.
When Cricket meets Olympia, he is only nine years old. The introverted son of a single mother who has recently lost his beloved grandfather, he struggles as he is made to endure his mother’s string of terrible live-in boyfriends. Cricket is adrift, until Olympia arrives in his life like a supernova. For the next six decades the two orbit each other, coming together, drifting apart, and always showing up when it counts.
I’ll confess: I am not a big reader of coming-of-age stories. Underage protagonists leave me restless, and so I almost put this down in the early pages. Reader, I did not put it down. And by the end I was completely undone, which tells you everything about how necessary those opening sections turned out to be. Eggers knew exactly what he was doing.
More here.
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