Day 3:

The Goldfinch

Clearly, my book a day challenge is not an everyday thing like it’s probably intended, but I’m a big fan of making challenges work in with your own needs and what I need right now is a challenge that I can post on the days when I don’t have any other posts and this one’s perfect for that!

So, today’s book is The Goldfinch, a massive book that many say was ‘over-written’ but in my opinion was utterly perfect in every way. I thought it was clever, illuminating and absorbing. I read it with an online bookclub and I was pretty much the only person who finished it.

It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don’t know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.

As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love-and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch combines vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and suspense, while plumbing with a philosopher’s calm the deepest mysteries of love, identity, and art. It is an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the ruthless machinations of fate.