I read the "The Laser Age" last summer in the New Yorker and I thought it was a masterpiece. I snarfed up all those beautifully-crafted, sad, funny sentences like they were dipped in chocolate. I shared the story with friends. It held up after the third read. I will buy this novel.

But another novel about people doing depressing, self-destructive things? If the outside world looked at our creative culture circa the past 25 years, they'd think us the most unimaginative, hyper-cynical, manic depressive people in the world.

When will we have novels that are beautiful, imaginative, and dramatic without all this mopey, "tortured soul!!" crap? There's more to the world than x realistic setting, y quirky situation, z characters falling apart (then the life affirming ending, where all the ideas are summed up! Steven Segal even used this technique in Above the Law).

So many of these novels are really good, but it's same story told in the same way over and over again ... when will we get something fresh and new from our own country to talk about? Not to say expression isn't great, but you know ... things get boring every now and then, no matter how good it is. I say we need more stories where people come to terms with things.

"Cheddar from up the lake in Shelbourne"?

Hard to work up too much enthusiasm for an author who screws up the basic details of his setting. The name of the Vermont town is spelled "Shelburne."

Most reviews I read lately are suffused with hyperbole unsupported by the few passages excerpted from the book in question. This, on the other hand, looks promising.

This story looked interesting till I realized the reviewer was just a tad bit too excited. She writes:

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Even a grocery list is gorgeous: "A flour sack as big as a pillow ... A bucket of shortening ... Ricotta cheese. Cottage cheese. Cheddar from up the lake in Shelbourne."

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Um. Exactly what is it that's so gorgeous about this grocery list?

Not that I have anything against it. But. Um. Gorgeous?

Makes me think the rest of the review is hyperbole, and it makes me somewhat uninterested.

While I'm intrigued by her emotional reaction, Hillary Frey's examples of choice sentences sound a little more like a stoner's musings than new, insightful images: "...the sun was like a photograph of the sun." Whoa. Dude. My mind is freaking BLOWN.

Like the reviewer, I was ready to like this book because of the "boy who runs off with his teacher" theme.

And I still may like it, for that reason.

But: "gorgeous" writing? Tussing's writing may well be gorgeous. But the examples Frey gives are poorly chosen, if so. A sunset is "like a beautiful television"???!! Let's set aside the fact that writing in depth about sunsets is so cliched it's painful. Examples like this make me think that reading this book would be like talking to your stoner friends from high school who remained stoners into middle age, while everyone else got bored with describing sunsets, went off and did something else, like join the Peace Corps or become a pirate.

And finally, I'm a college professor, so please forgive me my pedanticism -- but "gift" ain't no verb.

I am a bookseller in a large bookstore chain where I happened to picked up the advanced reader copy of this book.

I have no intellectual input as I am not educated beyond high school, nor do I claim to have any expertise when it comes to critiquing. I simply found this book very moving. It was so easy to get to know the characters and form an attachment to them. In my opinion, the best kind of book to read is the one that allows you to be a part of it. One that stays with you as though it were a memory of an actual event. One that you can't quite shake after you have finished reading it. I would not hesitate to read anything else that Mr. Tussing chooses to put to paper.