HOW FAR IS THE OCEAN FROM HERE: Amy Shearn.

I suspected that I would be no good at reviewing a friend’s book, but how about a blogging quasi-friend? In a way, that’s even more dangerous territory than reviewing the book of a real-life friend–not that I actually have any of those, really.

I have encountered people who have published before, and the truth of the matter is that it is usually highly disappointing. Certainly, people who exist in real life can’t write the good stuff. That’s just not how it works, apparently.

Needless to say, I was pretty surprised when I was sitting around in that same old Borders near  Bobby’s office, immersed in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, and I looked up for no apparent reason and saw sitting on the shelf several copies of How Far Is the Ocean From Here, courtesy of Ms. Moonlight Ambulette herself. Of course I couldn’t let that pass by, not in good conscience.

I was conflicted before I started the book. As I said, there is no way that a living, breathing person I have talked to wrote a good book–these things just don’t happen. So before I began the book, I resolved to include in my blog a good, solid pat on the back in lieu of an actual opinion or review. You published, Ms. Shearn, good for you!

As it turned out, there was a problem with that plan: the book was… well, good. I mean, really good. Ms. Shearn knows what she’s doing! While the plot itself is compelling, the language is staggeringly beautiful. I was, admittedly, a little confused by the ending, but not to a troubling extent, and perhaps it would make perfect sense to anyone else and I just missed something. Otherwise, it was a totally engrossing read.

It was this accumulation that she craved, this collecting of details, creating a satchel for each person that mattered. Comparing scars with Rose, paging through Aaron’s old yearbooks; love was acquisition.

In my head, I had wanted to swallow it all in a single gulp and blog about it before the book was even technically released (I somehow found it prior to the release date), but this plan failed to take into account the time spent on my classes. The story of a young surrogate, carrying on an emotional affair with one half of the forty-something couple who are biological parents to the baby, who runs away two weeks prior to her due date and becomes involved with a woman on a road trip with her hermaphrodite “niece” and the owners of a roadside motel and their mentally challenged son. If that plus Amy Shearn’s inimitable style don’t keep the pages turning, you’re simply not meant to be reading.

“You’d have been a good woman if nothing bad had ever happened to you.” Char said it quietly. “I want you to know I understand that.”

So I don’t quite want to give it a star rating like normal. Instead, I want to “rate” it according to something an old professor of mine used to consider regarding each new book he read. Will we still be reading this book in ten years? Surely. Will we be reading this book in fifty years? Perhaps! Will we be reading this book one hundred years from now? Based on one book alone (by any author), that seems unlikely. However, I really and truly believe that there is no reason in the world this book could not be the beginning of a collective body of work that could endure another hundred years.

Keep up the good work, Amy!