The Stone World by Joel Agee

​       I’m delighted to be the first person to rate and review this book, though wish it would have had more readership by now.
      I’ve been going through a lot of speculative fiction and wanted to slow things down with a proper literary novel and this one certainly did the trick. And though I am an avowed agist, Stone World worked surprisingly well despite having a six-year-old for narrator, in fact, it probably what made the novel work so well.
      Pira, as his name is colloquially pronounced, is a young American boy living in Mexico with his violinist mother, the writer she married (whom he considers his second father) and their maid. By all accounts it’s a nice life, he has friends, pets, adventures, even his first love, and, this being the last summer before starting school, is looking forward to attending first grade.
      But there are things going on all around him, adult things, things his communist father, determined to get back to his fatherland now that the war is over, might be involved in, things that might change their entire lives.
       This novel works on two levels. First, as just a lovely, vividly rendered account of a summer in a distant (unless you’re in Mexico) land in a distant (unless you’re a time-traveler) time. And second, as an excellent depiction of a socially and politically tumultuous post WWII era in both North America and Europe.
       There’s a scene in the book where Pira uses a mirror to walk around with and see things from different angles, noting how different life looks from unexpected perspectives. That’s pretty much exactly the trick the author uses for this book, by giving us such a young (albeit smart, emotional intelligent and precocious) narrator he shifts the perspective to allow the readers a different view at the characters (real life and imagined), their actions and the world they inhabit. It’s very clever and I enjoyed it.
       In fact, the entire book was very enjoyable and had an undeniable charm. And then it sort of just ended. Much like a summer does. And I, with my recent steady diet of speculative fiction that thrives on twists and variously amplified endings, kind of wanted more. But that’s neither here nor there, really, because the novel did exactly what it wanted and told exactly the story it had in mind. A story I liked reading. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.