It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

 

Whew!  Made it through last week, the first week in the start of my crazy fall & winter schedule.  Now that school, scouts and church activities have started up and are in full swing I rarely see my home before 9pm each evening.  While I enjoy a full schedule, unfortunately it doesn’t leave much room for reading.

However, I did finish the book featured in this meme last week, The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian (review coming soon).

For this week I am committing myself to another 400 page book Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks.

 

Suspended in a strange modern-day version of limbo, the young man at the center of  Russell Banks uncompromising and morally complex new novel must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration.  Known in jis new identity only as the Kid, and on probation after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of anywhere children might gather.  With nowhere else to go, the Kid takes up residence under a south Florida causeway, in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders.

 Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid, despite his crime, is in many ways an innocent, trapped by impulses and foolish choices he himself struggles to comprehend.  Enter the Professor, a man who has built his own life on secrets and lies.  A university sociologist of enormous size and intellect, he finds in the Kid a perfect subject for his research on homelessness and recidivism among convicted sex offenders.  The two men forge a tentative partnership, thre Kid remaining wary of the Professor’s motives even as he accepts the counsel and financial assistance of the older man.

When the camp beneath the causeway is raided by the police, and later, when a hurricane all but destroys the settlement, the Professor tries to help the Kid in practical matters while trying to teach his young charge new ways of looking at, and understanding, what he has done.  But when the Professor’s past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men’s relationship shifts.

Suddenly, the Kid must reconsider everything he has come to believe, and choose what course of action to take when faced with a new kind of moral decision.

Sounds like it could be filled with moral complexities!  Can’t wait!  I hope you all have a great week, and keep those pages turning!

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading is a weekly meme hosted by Sheila over at Book Journey