| GOODREADS | AMAZON | MY RATING: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ |
Goodreads synopsis: If she wanted help changing the world for one forgotten child, she chose the wrong man. Seventy-two-year-old Francis Frick would scorn his own family to close another deal. But Bee doesn’t see the world like you or me. She is an optimist, searching for potential where none exists, and so she hovers above Frick’s bed every night, eating pomegranates and waiting for his eyes to open to the possibilities. One night, it finally happens. A rogue droplet of juice slips through her fingers and hits the sleeping Manhattan businessman on the forehead, thrusting him on a series of baffling adventures to some of the twentieth century’s most brutal regimes—all to help Bee save a forgotten child of history.
A Man Too Old for a Place Too Far is part one of The Forgotten Child Trilogy—a one-of-a-kind adventure that mixes time travel, magical realism, and historical fiction into a contemporary story about an old man, his estranged daughter, and a tiny flying person in a white robe, who chooses to believe that anything can happen with enough prodding and an endless supply of pomegranates.
My thoughts: A received this book from the author against an honest review. I haven’t heard about Sasse before he contacted me and I was a little skeptical when I started the book but now I’m happy that I gave it a shot. I’m pleasantly surprised with the book and its story and Sasses unique way of writing. It was refreshing and new.
In this book, you get to meet some really unique characters that keeps growing and evolve in this unique story. We get to follow Francis Frick, who is like a modern Scrooge, you know, the stingy character from Mr Dickens’s story “A Christmas carol”? Frick is a man who has lived his life in the purpose to make money. He hates everything and everybody and has no care for anyone but himself. Not even his daughter. He is a grumpy old man who one night meets Bree, who takes Frick through time and place and forces him to see others than himself. The big different here is that Bree in reality, takes Frick back in time and everything he does there, changes the future. She has a purpose with everything she does but nothing of it is clear for the readers or Mr Frick.
It is an intriguing story and Mr Sasse do not give the readers much to figure out how it all fits together until the end. The language is easy to read and understand and the book keeps the same flow through and through. All the characters are great and keeps evolving deeper in the story and the whole book just captivates you. However, it feels a little long sometimes since you don’t get a lot of clues and after 200 pages, I still didn’t know more than I did at the 50 pages’ mark. Well, not more than that Frick is a total asshole and every human in his company is a freaking saint who put up with it.
And I feel that how it all hangs together, is still not 100% clear to me even though I’m done with the book. There are some questions I have that I never got any answers on. Probably done with purpose since this book is part of a series and there is a strong possibility that those answers will come in another book. However, I do not feel that the book ended on a cliffhanger and you, who have followed me for some time now, knows how much I hate cliffhangers.
So one question still stands unanswered and that is “Would I read anything by Mr Sasse again?” and after reading this book I only have one answer. Yes! Yes, I would.
