Book # 57 - A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

I'm trying to think of the best way to quickly summarize A Prayer for Owen Meany and I'm not sure if that can be done. The narrator, John Wheelwright, tells us about his childhood and young adulthood in New Hampshire of which his friend Owen Meany plays a large part. Owen is extremely short for his age and has a very unique voice which is shown in the text with all capital letters. Everyone thinks that Owen is either weird or special in some way and he himself thinks that he was placed on Earth for some special purpose by God.

I enjoyed the book quite a bit and found the friendship between the two to be very genuine. I also liked that it just accepts some events that could only be explained as miracles. My biggest qualm would be that Owen is just so much more interesting of a character than the narrator. The narrator is kind of a boring guy and at times is too passive. Even when one of the narrator's main story lines is resolved (the revelation of the identity of his father) he admits that it is totally anti-climactic and disappointing. And the bits about the narrator's current life are totally unnecessary. I'll give it an A-.

Also worth mentioning... the book cover of the copy I read is just sooooo bad. Please don't judge this book on a cover that is just a picture of a dressmakers dummy. Such an item is actually an important part of the story but the text specifically mentions that it was always dressed and never left uncovered... yet the picture is of an empty dummy. Seriously, who picked this book cover.

Also there were eleven list book mentions :Animal Farm, 1984, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Pride and Prejudice, Tess of the D'Ubervilles, Wuthering Heights, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Anna Karenina !