The Things That Make Me Weak And Strange Get Engineered Away
It's only natural that Alan, the broadminded hero of Doctorow's fresh, unconventional
Scince Fiction novel, is willing to help everybody he meets. After all, he's the product
of a mixed marriage (his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine), so
he knows how much being an outcast can hurt. Alan tries desperately to behave like
a human being.or at least like his idealized version of one. He joins a cyber-anarchist's
plot to spread a free wireless Internet through Toronto at the same time he agrees to
protect his youngest brothers (members of a set of Russian nesting dolls) from their dead
brother who's now resurrected and bent on revenge. Life gets even more chaotic after he
becomes the lover and protector of the girl next door, whom he tries to restrain from
periodically cutting off her wings. Doctorow (Eastern Standard Tribe) treats these and
other bizarre images and themes with deadpan wit. In this inventive parable about
tolerance and acceptance, he demonstrates how memorably the outrageous and the everyday
can coexist.
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