Summary: Two cousins in New York City get in on the ground floor of comic books. The book follows them for 15 years through their highs and lows.
Michael Chabon is one of those writers that has been recommended to me and I have been meaning to read for a while. I didn’t really know anything about it, but The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 so it seemed like a good choice when I saw it on sale a while back.
Joe Kavalier escapes out of Prague just before World War II breaks out and moves in with his Aunt and cousin Sam Clayman in New York City. Sam finds out that Joe is an artist and together with Sam primarily writing and Joe primarily drawing, they become the great comic book writing duo of Kavalier and Clay.
Their main comic book hero, the Escapist has great success, but World War II breaks out and things that have been going well, no longer are going well.
I really do not want to give away the story, but it is a wide ranging story. There is war, love, death, family, magic and more. Chabon is a great descriptive writer and this is a long book, but I was engaged virtually the entire time.
Toward the last third of the book I started getting a bit frustrated because it seemed everything was going wrong. But at the end I was also a bit frustrated because the book was wrapped up a little too nicely.
I have zero regrets that I read it. It is one of my favorite books I have read this year and I will totally read more books by Chabon. But endings are hard and it seems to me more and more that there are really very few good endings.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook