High School/Adult
If the title sounds familiar, it may be because of the Tim Burton film adaptation, starring the oh, so handsome Ewan McGregor as Edward Bloom. That movie is the primary reason I asked that the library get this book: it was that phenomenal. Quirky, yes. A bit over-the-top, yes. But that is the nature of myths (and of Tim Burton films). They challenge us to reach outside the blah of our everyday lives and see something larger and more profound. And the idea that this profundity (yes, it's a word -- look it up) can be found in an ordinary man's life is terribly appealing, since it affirms that all our lives, however simple they may be, can be the stuff of dreams.
The book, like the movie, is about a son's search for who his father really was and is. Edward Bloom is a teller of tall tales, of jokes, of everything but the hard facts of his life. There is a wall between him and his son, a wall made of words, of lost time, and of myth. For that is what Will has done his whole life -- what all sons (and daughters) do at some point -- mythologize his father. Now he wants to know the "truth" behind the fish tales before his father dies; he wants to know the real Edward Bloom before it is too late, only to realize that the stories of his father, that the stories of any father, are as close as he can come. And perhaps, just perhaps, that is close enough.
Don't expect the book and the movie to be exactly the same in every aspect; the stories are a bit different. But the heart and the voice of Will as he tells his father's stories and the stories of his father's death make them as humorous and heart-wrenching as anything the movie produced. But go ahead and let Ewan McGregor run around in your mind's eye -- that never hurt a thing.
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