Name: A Pigeon and a Boy
ISBN: 9780805242515

Meir Shalev

A young, dying pigeon handler dispatches a bird with a message for the girl he loves, while many years later, that girl's middle-aged son falls in love with a childhood friend and receives a gift from his mother on her deathbed.

A Pigeon and a Boy

Laura Mauler

The descriptions of his house make me want to pack up and move to Israel right now.

Dana Kraft

It took 80 pages or so for me to get into this story, and I'm glad I stuck with it. The writing (and translation) is excellent and almost all the characters were interesting in their own ways. It made me think about how our lives are shaped by our own actions and the actions of so many other people that we know or don't know, and then how we choose to embrace or reject all those forces.

A few of my favorite quotes are:
"Her eyes had remained yellow-green, a few small lines gathered at their corners: Which of you were etched by time? Which by laughter?" p. 133
"'We're lucky,' he said, 'that we lose some of our memory when we get old. Otherwise, we'd have an even heavier load to carry just when we don't have the strength...." p. 112
"'You can't take that away from the guy: with Meshulam, his mouth and his heart and one and the same.'" p. 134
"He's not nice at all. You have no idea how not nice he really is. But the little niceness he has he concentrates on four people, and because you're one of them you think he's really like that." p. 269