Just Finished! Far Far Away by Tom McNeal

"The dead maid set her hollow eyes on me. 'It all depends on you.'" -Tom McNeal, Far Far Away

Tom McNeal's Far Far Away

A small town.  A girl without parents.  A boy who hears voices.  A ghost with an unknown task.

Disappearances.  Too many, it would seem, to ignore.

I've just finished Tom McNeal's Far Far Away, a National Book Award Finalist and overall one of the creepiest stories I've read in a long time.  Far Far Away is the story of Jeremy Johnson Johnson (his parents, though unrelated, had the same last name), a boy with either a special gift or a terrible curse, depending on who you ask.  Jeremy hears voices--sometimes suddenly, sometimes briefly, sometimes for extended periods of time.  The day his grandfather died, Jeremy heard brief words of encouragement and support.  Long after his mother had run away with an exotic stranger, Jeremy heard words of apology--just before receiving the news his mother had passed away.  And, recently, the same voice has followed him daily, a voice with a thick accent and an odd, eloquent, dated way of speaking: the voice of Jacob Grimm, the long-deceased scholar of German fairy tales. 

Grimm, the book's ghostly narrator, tells the reader early that, though his intentions were good, the story does not necessarily end well.  For within this small town, a Finder of Occasions waits to harm Jeremy.  Grimm believes that, if he can identify this Finder of Occasions, he may be able to escape the Zwischenraum--the between-world in which spirits with unfinished business await the day they can pass into the great beyond.  And although like Jeremy and Jacob many of the town's young people wish to escape the confines of their current situations, too many seem to have "run away" in recent years.  Could their sudden disappearances be the work of the man Jacob seeks, the Finder of Occasions?  What if the man already knows Jeremy, and what if his plans for harming Jeremy are already in motion?

Far Far Away is narrated
by the ghost of Jacob Grimm
 

What if, suddenly and unexpectedly, Jeremy disappeared?

McNeal's book is definitely one of my new favorites.  Jeremy is an incredible character whose pain, up to the final page, is wholly felt by the reader and whose value, despite some poor decisions, we never question.  Similar to Susie in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, Far Far Away's ghostly storyteller is afforded much of the knowledge of a third-person omniscient narrator while actually being connected with the story's events the way typical first-person narrators are.  This allows the events in the story to unfold in a thrilling way only possible with an element of the supernatural, especially considering how the Grimm brother's ghost finds himself in a real-life fairy tale.  Finally, while the presence of Jacob's ghost provides an eerie element from the first page, the book goes from strange to legitimately frightening about two-thirds of the way through.  Just as I began to wonder where the story was headed (not to mention why so many people had described it as "twisted" and "incredibly creepy"), a suspicion I'd held since the beginning but had not quite taken seriously materialized, and I literally said aloud, "Wait, no!"  What suspicion?  You will, of course, have to pick up the book to find out.

As I mentioned, Far Far Away is up for the National Book Award, and the winner of of that award is due to be announced in May.  For whatever reason, I tend not to read books right when they come out, even when they're written by my favorite authors.  Perhaps I'm an simply an unwavering supporter of the idea that a reader must find the right book at the right time in his or her life (as soon as Dave Eggers asks me what book I feel like reading at this particular moment in my life and then plans, writes, and publishes that book before my mind or feelings change, I'll buy the first edition; excepting that, I'll likely wait until something strikes my fancy).  But I happened to have Far Far Away recommended to me not long after its release, and I'm now waiting anxiously to see how it fares in May.  A professor of mine reads all the books up for the big awards every year, and I can see now how exciting that could be.  New reading goal?  Quite possibly...

Pick up McNeal's book and let me know what you think, or, as always, feel free to recommend something else you think I may enjoy!

Happy reading.