![]() ![]() The book hardly seems able to stay between its covers, bulging as it is with so many astonishments, so many crossings of fictional lines.It is, moreover, a genuine publishing phenomenon over which the book world (and even the film world) is buzzing with barely contained excitement. The novel is a cabinet of wonders, an odyssey of self-discovery, a family romance, a symphony of topography, geology and American history. In the center of the novel appears a book within a book, a narrative of T.S.’s ancestors written by his mother. Spivet, a debut novel narrated by the pre-pubescent cartographer, filled to the very edges of each page with his hundreds of drawings and other assorted marginalia. So begins Reif Larsen’s miraculous The Selected Works of T.S. He will run away from home, from the unbearable memory of his little brother Layton’s accidental death, which–unaccountably–he had a hand in. What his rancher father and scientist mother don’t know is that he will get there, making the crossing from the family ranch in Divide, Montana, to the Mall in D.C. doesn’t know is how he’s going to get to Washington. ![]() ![]() What the Smithsonian doesn’t know is that T.S. Spivet gets a phone call from the Smithsonian Institution, informing him that he has won a national award for his mapmaking and will be the keynote speaker at an upcoming celebration in Washington. ![]()
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