This is definitely one of the top three most beautiful books I have read this year. Not only is it well written, but it is well researched and really makes you think without making you struggle to do so. As I haven’t read any of the award winners for which this book was nominated, I can’t say my theory holds that the nominees are generally better than the winners, but that’s still my gut response.
Not that you would want to, because the book is fairly deceptively complicated, but if you had to sum it up in one line it would be the following:
“Sometimes you had to be who you were and endure what happened to you, and to you alone, before you could understand the first thing about it.” (67)
This is definitely one of the themes of the book, along with acceptance and surviving and any other number of things. And it doesn’t just have to do with Wayne/Annabel, but with Thomasina, Wally, Jacinta, and Treadway. And any of the other countless people who lived in Croydon Harbor and are survivors.
Hood is the first of the 40 books I’ve committed to in Reading Challenges for 2012. It comes from the 
I could be predictable and say the story is about the English patient, as the title suggests, or any of the main characters, but it’s not. It’s not even about living through World War II. To me this novel is about survival.
What a stark contrast to Henry Miller’s 
When I picked up this novel the back cover read as follows, “Peter Paddington is your typical thirteen-year-old paperboy with a few exceptions. He’s 204 pounds, at the mercy of an overactive imagination, and his only friend is a trash-talking beauty queen reject from across the street. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Peter’s nipples pop out one day and begin speaking to him threatening to expose his private fantasies to an unkind world.”