“[An] oddball fairy tale… This strange little book lingers in the mind.”
Description
An “oddball fairy tale” (The New York Times)—shortlisted for one of France’s highest literary prizes—a dark, funny, and wholly charming novel about a young boy and his eccentric family, who grapple with the realities of mental illness in unique and whimsical ways.
A young boy lives with his madcap parents, Louise and George, and an exotic bird in a Parisian apartment, where the unopened mail rises in a tower by the door and his parents dance each night to Nina Simone’s mellifluous classic “Mister Bojangles.” As his mother, mesmerizing and unpredictable, descends deeper into her own mind, it is up to the boy and his father to keep her safe—and, when that fails, happy. Fleeing Paris for a country home in Spain, they come to understand that some of the most radiant people bear the heaviest burdens.
Told from the perspective of a young boy who idolizes his parents—and from George’s journals, detailing his epic love story with his wife—Waiting for Bojangles is a “lighthearted and yet sorrowful tale” (San Francisco Chronicle) that will stay with you long after the final page.
Reviews
“Spirited and graciously zany, Waiting for Bojangles is a passionate love story told through the eyes of a child.”
“The novel is written in partial rhyme… [and] the singsong prose adds to the madcap nature of this lighthearted and yet sorrowful tale.”
“This fanciful love story, fraught with sadness, is a sweet meditation on the more unorthodox gifts that parents leave the children they cherish.”