A review by jaccarmac
The Red Arrow by William Brewer

emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

The opening prose blew me away, sentences expanding as funny poignant intimate thought. The treatment was rather obvious at its introduction (a fact which got me into trouble with a later "obvious" sickness; mea culpa), and I hoped for more mystery there. It's misanthropic of me, I suppose: Here's this guy with a successful wife, honeymoon in Italy, brilliant and friendly colleagues, and his internal struggle just gets switched off? The solution is just a touch too clean, this reader thinks, though to be fair its no thing resolution has enough dark side to come off as less than preachy in toto. The prose of the opening was gradually overshadowed by plot, which wrapped around beautifully. I was worried that the securing of loose ends would kill my appreciation with triteness, but the Physicist storyline, while compressed, is fresh enough. Time concepts like this lend themselves to loops, but Brewer's characters contort themselves into more of a figure-eight in the end. It's on that note that the novel closes, crystallizing time but with future hope.