Radioactive Love Song
I have just read a special BEA preview of Sherman Alexie’s next book, Radioactive Love Song, due out next spring, and I am very happy. Which is a bit odd, I suppose, because the excerpt – which ends with the fifth chapter – is not exactly cheerful. It is about thirty pages of narrated unrequited love. And I can certainly speak from personal experience, there is nothing happy about unrequited love. But Alexie is clever and sensitive and dang interesting, so I somehow got through the thirty pages so pleased to know the main character that his own troubles faded in significance against the happiness of meeting him. I am also delighted to announce that this is one of the only children’s/teen’s books I’ve come across in which the main character has a fabulous mother! There are plenty of dead mother stories littering the shelves of young readers – even one entitled One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies. But this one-of-a-kind book gives us at least thirty pages of a well-mothered character, who manages to be interesting and insightful despite the interference of parentage. Bravo Sherman Alexie. You are unique among authors.
Review by Molly Lewis
