It took me entirely way to long to read this book. I would go so far as saying that this is a fascinating fictional case study of an orphan and the doctor who raised him in New England. We spend the entire novel following the orphan Homer Wells and Doctor Wilbur Larch. It’s a rather plain and simple story, but the details and the little twists and turns throughout the novel create the oxymoron of an intricately simple love story. From the love of a ‘father’ to a non-nuclear family’s love for each other and the unrequited love of a childhood friend overall this is a love story and a story about the various types of love you experience through life.
Although Homer and Larch are the clear protagonists, it’s clearly a story of relationships and interactions and the various relationships love has to and within each interaction. If you ever wanted to catalogue the types of love this would be a great novel to read because I’m fairly certain they are all here, from convenience and unrequited to lust and familial. It’s hard to pinpoint which type of love Irving wants the reader to focus on, gut instinct would be either the fatherly love of Larch for Homer, or the love between Wally, Candy and Homer or even Melony’s strange interpretation of love for Homer, but I would say it was the smaller loves that truly made the novel. The unwavering love of Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela for their charges, especially Homer, and for Larch, or even Olive and Ray Kendall’s love for Wally, Homer and Candy even though they know the confusion they’re facing.
You have to love a book with its first chapter titled “Rainy Days and Mondays Always Get Me Down.” I’m not positive but I think most of the chapters were song lyrics and most of them made me smile. Bootlegger’s Daughter takes place in a fictional rural county of North Carolina which vaguely resembles the surrounding counties where I grew up (thank you I-95).