Rach's Reading Club

Book Review: Everybody's Fool
Theme: May (this book made me laugh outright many times)

Author: Richard Russo

This novel is a Pulitzer Prize winner. Normally that alone is enough to make me not want to read a book. BUT. This is AWESOME.

Written with tons of wit, Russo’s characters come to life in a few paragraphs. He has a way with words. I laughed out loud on nearly every page.

Sully is one of the main characters. There is a book before this one that I’ve not read yet, Nobody’s Fool, which I will undoubtedly put in my queue at the library. Somebody’s Fool is the sequel to this one.

The story centers around a few main characters in Bath, New York. The police chief, Rainer, Sully, and Sully's once upon a time married lover, Ruth. From their lives sprout a host of other characters. Some beloved, some reviled. And yes, I did have strong opinions about each of the characters. Everyone has a backstory.

Bath is not a place you would want to live. Apparently, neither do most of the residents. There are numerous things wrong with the city, starting out with a cemetery whose unwilling inhabitants seem to be sliding from their former planting places, migrating who knows where due to a flaw in the construction of said cemetery.

Lots of things happen in this story. I got a really good sense of who these characters are and what they are feeling.

No, I don’t want to live in Bath, but I DO want to read other masterful novels such as this one.