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Setting Free the Kites

Review

Setting Free the Kites

When you’re a kid, finding a kindred soul, especially one close to your age, is perhaps the single most important event of your young life. Keeping that friendship alive is one of the greatest and most complex struggles of your young life. Managing to uphold that brotherhood in the face of unspeakable tragedy is the most difficult and the most educational and meaningful of your young life. In SETTING FREE THE KITES, a sudden tragedy pulls together two young misfits who, in turn, bring their families together in a heartfelt and heartwarming story of community and love, and the pastiche that was 20th-century life in the ’70s.

"SETTING FREE THE KITES finds a way into our hearts without pushing and prodding. Instead, we feel like we are just walking into the lives of people who are happy to share what it’s really like to be human."

Alex George’s novel, set in a rural area of Maine, interweaves so many interesting subjects that the comparisons to John Irving, Wally Lamb and Nick Hornby have been running rampant in lit circles. However, the story feels even more like Judy Blume to me, a coming-of-age tale that doesn’t mince around difficult subjects, that writes about all things and all people in a language plainspoken and yet distinctly poetic in its simplicity. There is nothing far-fetched or elaborate about George’s world. The way people talk, endure pain and find humor in the most ridiculous corners of their world is a godsend for readers looking for depth but not interested in 24-page monologues or paragraphs. (Sorry, Marcel, you are wondrous, but sometimes, especially in terms of all that is being thrown at us everyday in our upside-down world, quiet strength is all we need from a book.)

SETTING FREE THE KITES finds a way into our hearts without pushing and prodding. Instead, we feel like we are just walking into the lives of people who are happy to share what it’s really like to be human. It’s lovely. And that is high praise indeed.

Robert Carter and Nathan Tilly are trying to escape both mental and physical handicaps. Loss, muscular dystrophy, dreams of great literary acclaim, rollercoasters, and a mongoose named after Philippe Petit offer the reader a world view that feels immediate and yet is clearly and stalwartly situated in the past. Our American past is never quite so present as when the boys are experiencing something new. George understands that the most important experiences in life happen to all of us, regardless of whether we live in Maine, a tenement, a ghost town, or the middle of Manhattan.

There are so many stories here that trying to explain any of them would give away too much of the book’s emotional resonance. Instead, simply stated, SETTING FREE THE KITES will provide you with a dream of an America that is past but whose wonders are still alive within us all, even those who never experienced those now-considered-halcyon days when justice prevailed and hope for a better future abounded.

Perhaps a book as innocent but full of meaning like this could be a beacon to all those who feel that this time in America may be a tipping point to a new era of nihilism. Those values are still here, as exemplified by these wonderful characters. There could be no finer time for this novel to be published. May SETTING FREE THE KITES soar into everyone's book collection!

Reviewed by Jana Siciliano on February 24, 2017

Setting Free the Kites
by Alex George

  • Publication Date: February 21, 2017
  • Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction
  • Hardcover: 336 pages
  • Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
  • ISBN-10: 0399162100
  • ISBN-13: 9780399162107