No Two Persons

I just finished No Two Persons by Erica Bauermeister and here are my thoughts.

Alice always wanted to be a writer, knew it when she was just a little girl and found out that writers were real people. Her stories though, are written like she is a benign bystander. That is until the day her world is broken apart. A heartbreak so acute she can't hold all the words in and her debut novel is born.

Her words hit the lives of different people at different stages of their lives, each taking something different away from their experience of reading it. Proving that you really can just reach out and see how connected we all are to each other.

I literally received this book this morning. Upon seeing that it had already been published, I moved it to the top of my pile. I am so glad I did.

First thing to note, each chapter is a new point of view. I detest books that do this. I find it really hard to connect to characters with no development and let me tell you, this book proved me wrong. Each character in such a short time wove their way into my heart. The chapters were cleverly executed into mini stories all connected by this wonderful book called Theo. You work out that the protagonist really is the book. It's all about how it makes each character feel. What path it put them on and where they started to do their own healing. You also see where a few of the characters overlap slightly but they are never the focal point outside of their own chapter.

It was magical. The raw beauty of a collective experience that each person had a different take away of just shows how unique we all are. It was a different way of writing but it worked really well. The pace was slow but steady and that worked for me as well considering I crushed the book in less than 4 hours.

A book can really touch us in many different ways and this one will sit with me for a long time. I loved that time moved forward with each chapter too and Alice, the writer, ends the whole story.

I highly recommend this one. I have a real love for literary fiction and my standards are elevated but this one exceed every expectation I had.

5 stars. This book will make you contemplate every other book you ever read and what that book gave you.

Thank you @stmartinspress for my gifted copy. Thank you @ericabauermeisterauthor for the wonderful book you have written

A Marvel Of A Novel Novel. This tale reads a bit like The Decameron in that it is a collection of shorter stories all linked by some basic structure - in this case, *extremely* basic in that they all wind up interacting with a fictional book at some level. Be it the author, who opens and closes Baurmeister's tale, or the publishing assistant who first "finds" the book or a random sculptor who reads it after it was recommended or or or or or. The tales themselves show the breadth of how different types of readers interact with a book, though it is far from truly conclusive and I don't suspect that Bauermeister ever expected it to be "conclusive" or "definitive". Instead, this is simply a sampling of different ways different readers intersect with a given tale at the differing moments of both their lives and its life, and in showing these glimpses Bauermeister executes a particular narrative structure that I had never seen done before, certainly not in this exact context. And executes it quite well indeed. So read this book, because it truly is a marvel of a novel novel. ;) Very much recommended.