Rating: 5 out of 5

A book filled with excellent characters who develop as the story develops. It’s well written and I read the last third of the book in just a few hours as I didn’t want to put it down and pick it up anymore, I wanted to experience the final section in one go, even though the result is already known. And I’m glad I did as I was carried through it, experiencing it through Johnny’s narration. One of those books were you just need to stop for a moment when you’ve finished reading it.

Highlighted passages:

‘I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.’

my grandmother was not without humanity. And if she wore cocktail dresses when she labored in her rose garden, they were cocktail dresses that she no longer intended to wear to cocktail parties. Even in her rose garden, she did not want to be seen underdressed. If the dresses got too dirty from gardening, she threw them out. When my mother suggested to her that she might have them cleaned, my grandmother said, ‘What? And have those people at the cleaners wonder what I was doing in a dress to make it that dirty?’

‘IF YOU GO TO SCHOOL WITH RICH PEOPLE, YOU DON’T WANT TO LOOK LIKE THEIR SERVANTS.’

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time - the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes - when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever - there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving - Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who’s not home.

Holy Eucharist is better when you don’t have to shuffle up the aisle in a herd and stand in line at the communion railing, like an animal awaiting space at the feeding-trough - just like another consumer at a fast-food service.

‘PENGUINS!’

Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me the most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.

any good book is always in motion

HE WASN’T A GREAT THINKER, HE WAS A GREAT FEELER!

Owen’s plane, like the body he was escorting home, was late.

Originally posted to my Goodreads account