This new novel explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on a young boy named Gabe, who experiences the world through the lens of his family's retreat to a cottage during lockdown. The author, Andrew Forbes, known for his insightful personal essays on baseball and life's complexities, uses a subtle approach to convey the anxieties and uncertainties of the pandemic era.
Published just before the fifth anniversary of the appearance of “the novel coronavirus” in Wuhan, China,bravely takes a run at defining the pandemic’s influence on our lives, and specifically how it will shape those who were children when it arrived.
In the baseball books, Forbes’s meditations on these topics are illustrated with anecdotes from his life, but also discussed explicitly and at length on the page. In, a novel about late-19th century baseball, published concurrently – he leaves his philosophies between the lines. This is true of most fiction, of course, but Forbes takes it to an extreme.
Gabe’s mother, Kat, treats him with more compassion than his father, Artie, who wishes Gabe were more brave. Every day, Artie goads Gabe to jump from a high cliff into the lake, leaving Kat to console her anxious son when he’s barely able to get into the water at all. Even though, here in 2024, we know what happened next with COVID, the book still takes you back to that time when you weren’t sure what world awaited you outside your door. Some scenes feel like a zombie apocalypse movie, but with no zombies. Instead, it’s just a stranger who buys the land next door and drops by to introduce himself.– another story of a self-exiled family – the thing to be afraid of is already inside the home.
Fiction Pandemic COVID-19 Children's Literature Family Coming-Of-Age
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