It might get better towards the end, but I just didn't really care enough to find out.We left on a school day, so Esther wouldn’t see us. He seemed to have no investment in anything, and I found myself unable to finish the book out of sheer boredom and complete lack of intellectual and emotional engagement. I found the main character to be wholly unsympathetic and really had no investment in his life one way or the other. His wife and child are cardboard boxes that the narrator whines about. The family dynamics are thin to the point of non-existent. Overall, it is more about religion than it is about language.

The author seems stuck between wanting to write a compelling narrative and wanting to impart deep thoughts about knowledge and religion and failing at both. Instead, I got obscure thoughts about Judaism and paper thin characters.

I thought that a book about people falling sick because of their children would be a powerful meditation of communication, maybe with some insights into family dynamics and children rejecting their parents.

I love language and thinking about communication. Biblical in its Old Testament sense of wrath, Marcus's novel twists America's quotidian existence into something recognizable yet wholly alien to our experience. Although characterization plays second fiddle to vision here, in LeBov, a silver-tongued, authoritarian, flimflam man, Marcus has retooled a classic American archetype. Marcus (Notable American Women) proves equally inspired in sketching Sam's underground religion of 'forest Jews' who pray in individual huts and receive sermons via a special gelpack called a listener. The third part finds Sam living in the woods near his home, where he becomes a haunted creature out of a Yiddish folk tale. The second part reads like a Kafkaesque nightmare as Sam, separated from Claire, winds up in an isolated research facility, where he is put to work creating a new language that will be immune from the virus. The novel's first part plays like The Twilight Zone as a normal community becomes exposed to this mysterious infection. But he and Claire are soon forced to abandon Esther in order to save themselves. Heeding the advice of enigmatic prophet LeBov, Sam manufactures his own homemade defenses against his daughter's speech. in high flower,' Sam watches in horror as the disease spreads to children of other religions, quarantine zones are imposed, and Claire sickens to the point of death. But Esther and other Jewish children begin to speak a toxic form of language, potentially deadly to adults: with 'the Esther toxicity. Outside Rochester, N.Y., Sam and Claire are a normal Jewish couple with a sullen teenage daughter, Esther. Language kills in Marcus's audacious new work of fiction, a richly allusive look at a world transformed by a new form of illness.

The flame alphabet by ben marcus