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Title: This book reads the way life feels
Review: Alice McDermott has a genius for capturing the telling detail in every scene she describes, so that everything seems both recognizable and seen for the first time. The novel is masterful in conveying the quality of memory and of the mysteries that exist in all families - mysteries that everyone has an opinion on but that can never be finally resolved. How wonderful to read a book in which there are no heroes or villains - just people like the ones we know, occasionally elevated by their dreams or their loyalties or their sense of humor, then sunk by their weaknesses; and what a pleasure to read a book in which relationships within family and neighborhood are central without being the crux of some hideous abuse that explains everything. In life, and in Charming Billy, no one thing explains everything.
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