Reading is Sexy

By Fynn

“The diffrense[sic] from a person and an angel is easy. Most of an angel is in the inside and most of a person is on the outside.”

From the mouths of babes! as they say. These are the words of six-year old Anna – vivacious, flamboyant, uncomplicated, precocious, annoying (at times) but ultimately, adorable. She knows a secret. As incredibly young as she is, she knows absolutely the purpose of our existence.

Anna is a homeless child who is adopted, informally, by Fynn and his family. She is cared for loved and nursed by Fynn, his mother, their neighbours- the working girls, the miners and the public house staff. Her faith in Mister God is, to begin with, endearing and amusing. Her relationship with Fynn- whilst innocent and genuine, has a whiff of something not-quite-right. Its not them, rather it’s this time and age that I’m reading this book that makes it not-quite-right. The physical closeness that Fynn, an early 20s man, and Anna, a 5/6-year old girl, share is puzzling.

The book itself it slim. In fact, to slightly rephrase a quote from ‘Happy Gilmore’, ” I eat books like books these for Breakfast!”. I had appointed myself 2 days to finish reading it and it took me over a month. I think I may have also read 2 other books while I was still in the middle of this one. There were a number of times when I felt like it wasn’t for me and I was ready to give up. Anna is all about Mister God- all about how God is in our middle; I found her simplicity, her explanations quite frustrating. Nothing at all to do with her logic and everything to do with the fact that a 6-year old would have the, call it wisdom, call it bullshit, sense to articulate the way she does.  

There are a few parts of the book that kept me going, that made me want to see this through to the end. One of my favourite parts is when Anna, in the midst of her ‘discovering something new’ phase, would run up to the nearest person, shove a notepad and a pencil in their face and say,”Please write that down big, please.”

I read this book months ago. I couldn’t work out how I felt about it then and I cant work out how I feel about it now. I had hoped that writing about it would make it clearer. But, no. It hasn’t. One thing I will say about it, though, is that it doesn’t leave you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 23:04 and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.