RAINY DAY EXCERPTS: “THE GUNNERS”

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, First Chapter/Intros, originally hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea and now hosted by I’d Rather Be at the Beach; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by The Purple Booker.

Today’s feature is a book I just downloaded from the library:  The Gunners, by Rebecca Kauffman, a book that engages us with vividly unforgettable characters, and advances Rebecca Kauffman’s place as one of the most important young writers of her generation.

 

 

 

Intro:  Mikey Callahan discovered something about himself when he was six years old.

Students from his first-grade class were taken one at a time from the classroom and ushered to the gymnasium for standard medical tests.  The woman who barked his name (although she called for Michael, instead of Mikey, as his classmates knew him) held his hand as she walked him down the hall, and her fingers were as dry and cool as a husk.  In the gymnasium, there were rectangular tables, screens, clipboards, grown-ups dressed in white. 

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Teaser:  Alice and Mikey trudged together through the thick snow.  She unscrewed the cap of the bourbon, took a swig, and handed it Mikey’s way.  He took a swig as well, felt the heat of it like a shock. (59%).

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Synopsis:  Following her wonderfully received first novel, Another Place You’ve Never Been, called “mesmerizing,” “powerful,” and “gorgeous,” by critics all over the country, Rebecca Kauffman returns with Mikey Callahan, a thirty-year-old who is suffering from the clouded vision of macular degeneration. He struggles to establish human connections—even his emotional life is a blur.

As the novel begins, he is reconnecting with “The Gunners,” his group of childhood friends, after one of their members has committed suicide. Sally had distanced herself from all of them before ending her life, and she died harboring secrets about the group and its individuals. Mikey especially needs to confront dark secrets about his own past and his father. How much of this darkness accounts for the emotional stupor Mikey is suffering from as he reaches his maturity? And can The Gunners, prompted by Sally’s death, find their way to a new day? The core of this adventure, made by Mikey, Alice, Lynn, Jimmy, and Sam, becomes a search for the core of truth, friendship, and forgiveness.

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I’ve heard good things about this book.  What do you think?  Would you keep reading?

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