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Adult Books - Fiction - General Fiction
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The God of War.
Silver, Marisa (author).
Apr. 2008. 288p. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, $23 (9781416563167).
REVIEW.
First published March 15, 2008 (Booklist).
The Salton Sea seems like a mirage in the vast Southern California desert, but in 1978 it is a real, if endangered, sanctuary for pelicans, fish, and a ragtag little family. Ares, Silver’s utterly beguiling, fatherless narrator, tells the haunting story of his traumatic twelfth year. In spite of his youth, he is the man of the house, tending to Malcolm, his six-year-old half brother, who has severe learning disabilities. Ares believes he caused Malcolm’s condition, and he endures ridicule and violence as his brother’s protector in their drug-stoked outlaw town, while Laurel, a terrible mother and a mystic in denial, alienates her current lover, a Vietnam vet the boys adore. The school librarian is the only adult whom lonely and responsible Ares trusts, but her volatile foster son very nearly destroys Ares’ already precarious life. The author of No Direction Home (2005), Silver writes lyrically of family crises exacerbated by mental debilities, exquisitely evoking a land of natural beauty and human menace and mindscapes both shadowed and bright in an emotionally complex and unpredictable novel that insists on an all-at-once read. — Donna Seaman
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