Address Unknown

My Goodreads’ goal might find my logging this “book” into my reading challenge as cheating, but I swear, it’s not. Stick with me, because here is my reasoning:

1. I paid a book price for it.
2. It was sold in a bookstore.
3. It exists on Goodreads to be counted and logged in as a book.
4. Though it was brief, I thought about it for days afterward.

Okay. I feel better*.

*I’m also very close to missing my goal for the first time in five years and need all the short “books” I can get.

I love an epistolary story. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was charming. Dracula was thrilling. There is simply something about reading a story through the vantage point of intimate letters that makes me fall in love with it.

Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor does this in a way that is quick, clever, and will make your heart break by the end. It is a less than an hour, one sitting read, which made me spend more time than it took to read on contemplating the world, our news, and the way we as humans can be manipulated*.

*Spoiler alert: It’s a story about the spread of Nazism, with the letters beginning in November 1932 as Hitler was rising to power.

While I don’t have any quotes from the story to share, I’ll share this from the Introduction: “Good novels, as the name promises, keep bringing us the news, and we read them with both our outer and our inner eyes.” If I’ve learned anything from this book, it is to pay attention. Listen to what is happening around you and not to the loudest stories being told. Listen to the whispers.