The Lacuna.

Once in a while you read a book and you think it's the greatest thing ever, and once in a blue moon you read a book and it gets under your skin and can change completely how you think about things. This novel by Barbara Kingsolver is firmly in the latter category for me. It is about a man Harrison Shepherd, and it's this fictional man's life story told using his notebooks, but it's set in a world comprising of non fiction, well the authors take on these non fictional events and people at least, so you have people cropping up who you might of heard of like Frida Khalo (who from reading this comes across as my favourite woman ever), J.Edgar Hoover, Trotsky and a few others. History is not something I've much of an interest in, I certainly wouldn't seek out a historical novel but this is I guess one I read without even realising, it deals with politics in Mexico, the rise in communism, America and the whole cold war caper and to be honest those things bore me something silly but reading this I was like huh this is properly riveting! But I'm losing my way a little, the setting, all this historical basis isn't even the main part the whole story is about this man Harrison and the different things that happen and change him throughout his entire life. Lacuna means missing piece, a page absent in a document, the something that isn't there, and there is a line in this book that I loved 'the most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know'. Anyway why I'm I telling you that, well a part of his story is missing, one of his notebooks, I'm not going to give anything away on the off chance you might decide to read this book (which you most certainly should) but the thing that we don't know is the thing that changes him the most, the most important piece. I suppose as much as this book is the story of a man and it really is everything you could want for in a story, great characters, its funny, sad, exciting, thrilling its like an HBO production of a story to put it mildly but it also leaves you with a lesson on the power words have, for good and how they can tear people and lives apart as well. If I've ever read a book that has felt like the author has tailor written it especially for me, this is that book. 5 stars, hell 5 gold stars! It was epic in the truest sense of the word.