6/28/2023 0 Comments After the Parade by Lori Ostlund![]() ![]() ![]() In the tragicomic spirit of John Irving’s and Elizabeth Strout’s finest novels, Lori Ostlund’s debut is an openhearted contemplation of how we grow up and move on, how we can turn our deepest wounds into our greatest strengths. And when, all those years later, a new friend in San Francisco offers Aaron a way to locate his lost mother, his past and present collide, forcing him to rethink his place in the world. But Aaron’s sense of rejection runs deep: when Aaron was seventeen, Dolores, his mother, vanished one night. But soon after establishing himself in San Francisco-where he moves between a shoddy garage apartment and the ramshackle ESL school where he teaches-Aaron sees that real freedom will not come until he has made peace with his memories of Mortonville, Minnesota: a cramped town whose four hundred souls form the constellation of Aaron’s childhood heartbreaks and hopes.Īfter Aaron’s father died, it was the larger-than-life misfits of his childhood-a sardonic, wheelchair–bound dwarf named Clarence a generous, obese baker named Bernice a kindly aunt preoccupied with dreams of The Rapture-who served as Aaron’s allies. After twenty years under the Pygmalion-like care of his older partner Walter, Aaron at last decides it is time to take control of his own fate. ![]() Sensitive, bighearted, and achingly self-conscious, forty-year-old Aaron Englund long ago escaped the confines of his Midwestern hometown, but he still feels like an outcast. ![]()
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