I liked this novel a lot--I got sucked in from the first and read it in one sitting. It's not quite like anything I've read. Maybe the closest analogy is a modern prose version of Dante's Divine Comedy with a quirky sense of humor, a contemporary allegory of soul and psyche starring a man, Benjamin Gould, his girlfriend German Landis, their talking dog Pilot, and oh, yeah, Benjamin's ghost, Ling, living with Ben and in love with his girlfriend. And if that sounds whacky, hold on, because this story goes places I didn't expect. At one point it seemed to veer so completely off I wondered if the author had any idea where he was going, and just decided to go off on a tear because he had no idea what to do next. Yet there was enough heart and humor in the book to keep reading, and it eventually makes a bizarro sense. Psychologically sharp and insightful in ways that made me really think about how it would apply to me if I were the protagonist in this novel. It felt a bit heavy handed and sentimental at points but ultimately moving--towards the end it had me teary-eyed and left me grinning.
