Historical fiction at its finest

Sorry for not posting; out of town for a couple of days.  Which puts me even further behind on the recipes. Anyway, here's a book I read two weeks ago.

Love and other Consolation Prizes
by Jamie Ford

How does Jamie Ford make you love his imaginary people so darn much? I practically bawled at the end. If I were to get to vote on the book most deserving of being made into a movie, this would be mine.

It starts in 1962, when the narrator is an old man and his wife is ill, out of her head with late-stage syphilis which the doctor kindly describes as "a rare type of viral meningitis" to their daughters. But the next chapter takes him back to China in 1902,
when he and his mother were starving to death and his father, a white missionary, is no where in the picture. That chapter is titled "Raining Stars" and it's almost as heartbreaking as anything that follows.

As to what follows, I'm not saying. His life is an awesome adventure that takes place, for the most part, in a small area of Seattle. Mr. Ford continues to alternating between past and present but, oddly, it didn't annoy me. I got so caught up in the past--the main plot--that I hated to wrench away and return to the present. But the present-day events are important, too, and as I grew to love the narrator and wish him what he deserved, I was happy to come back to the here-and-now. Or at least, 1962.

The women in his life are superb. I wish I were Jamie Ford's mother so I could hug him for creating them. Strong or weak, ambitious or caring, sensible and (in one case) totally whack job, they're survivors. Maybe that's the ultimate difference between men and women: the drive to carry on, no matter what the cost.