Jun 20

Jun 20 Lanny

Author: Max Porter
Publisher: Graywolf Press
View on Goodreads

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

There’s a village sixty miles outside London. It’s no different from many other villages in England: one pub, one church, red-brick cottages, council cottages and a few bigger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might do anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs.

This village belongs to the people who live in it and to the people who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England’s mysterious past and its confounding present. But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a figure schoolchildren used to draw green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth.

Dead Papa Toothwort is awake. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to his English symphony. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, enchanting boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.

TL;DR Review

Lanny was exactly my kind of literary magical realism — visceral, full-bodied, whimsical, a little weird, and deeply resonant.

For you if: You are looking to read something really creative and affecting.

Full Review

“Dead Papa Toothwort wakes from his standing nap a mile wide and scrapes off dream dregs of bitumen glistening thick with liquid globs of litter. He lies down to hear hymns of the earth (there are none, so he hums), then he shrinks, cuts himself a mouth with a rusted ring pull and sucks up a wet skin of acid-rich mulch and fruity detritivores.”
“Dead Papa Toothwort chews the noise of the place and waits for his favorite taste, but he hasn’t gotten to it yet, and then he hears it, clear and true, the lovely sound of his favorite. The boy.”

I read Lanny because it was on the 2019 Booker Prize longlist, but I’m upset that I waited so long — this is exactly my kind of book. It will put you in your whole body and yank your heart and grip your gut. Also, it’s magical realism, which is always my jam.

The book is ultimately about a little boy named Lanny, who is quirky and smart and kind but definitely a little weird. There are three narrators: his mom, his dad, and an older neighbor who becomes a close family friend. Meanwhile, we also get occasional bursts of perspective from Dead Papa Toothwort, who is a local legend, a shapeshifting creature most believe to be myth, described to kids to keep them from misbehaving. Throughout, Dead Papa Toothwort watches Lanny, as he reminds him of himself in certain ways. All is reasonably well in these characters’ world, until suddenly Lanny goes missing.

I listened to this one’s audiobook and also flipped through the print version. Both are incredible. The print version plays with type in an incredibly creative way, and the audiobook is narrated by a cast that brings the whole story to life in a really magical, gripping way. It’s not long — only about 200 pages, but it packs a big punch.

What really struck me about this novel was how physical it was. How viscerally I was in the heads and bodies and world of these characters. The second section of the book, when Lanny goes missing, is particularly affecting and gut-wrenching and terrible and beautiful. And then the ending is fast-paced and exciting and will have you either listening intently or flipping pages faster and faster and faster.

I would have put this one on the shortlist, I think.