Book Review: Beautiful Children

Beautiful Children
by Charles Bock

Synopsis: One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and doesn’t come home. In the aftermath of his disappearance, his mother, Lorraine, makes daily pilgrimages to her son’s room and tortures herself with memories. Equally distraught, the boy’s father, Lincoln, finds himself wanting to comfort his wife even as he yearns for solace, a loving touch, any kind of intimacy.

To sum it up... sex, drugs and runaways. If you've ever been to Vegas, chances are you didn't go to the places this book goes. It's a trip through a seedy, drug-filled culture of homeless, cynical, lost children in parts of Vegas that my trips never take me (or ever will for that matter). It's definitely not a tribute to street kids as much as it is a precautionary tale really. I'm not sure how anyone could find this world inviting. It's portrayed as a sad, lonely, dangerous place that is very unforgiving.

The book is one of those novels where there are multiple stories going on at once and you spend a little bit of time wondering how they'll all eventually collide. You follow stories of a stripper, her porn obsessed boyfriend, a comic book artist, a rebelious young girl, a mother of a runaway, her shut-out husband, a confused wannabe comic book artist and of course the missing young man himself.

If you're easily offended by the drug culture or sexual deviance or the seedy side of things, I don't recommend this book to you at all. If you want to go on a journey to a dangerous, grimy world that you normally look away from, without any of the risk, it might be a must read.

This sounds weird, but the book is about a really dark, ugly world yet somehow the writing style makes it comes out as sort of beautiful. The language and rhythm are very unique and the story seems to flow naturally even as the time line jumps around. The depth of the characters despite the limited time on each is impressive. By the end, although it wasn't characters I related to, I understood them.

8/10