I'd heard about Tea Obreht for the first time when some of the MFAs in my program posted about how jealous they were of her success. She's only 26, she wrote this book while she was a student at Cornell, and she's had some wild success with it. The quotes on the back advertising it are all pretty much exactly the same: "A work of surpassing beauty," etc. But then, it IS such a beautiful book--that's really a great word to describe it--that you can't really blame her or her fans.
This book is set in some unnamed Balkan country, set right after some of the many wars there. It mainly traces the main protagonists relationship with her grandfather and tells his life story through these narratives of other people's lives. Although I KNOW I could have gone deeper and gotten more out of analyzing all the symbolism in here, I still feel like I enjoyed it enough to not have to worry about that too much. This book felt more like a Work of Literature more than some of the other books I've read lately, which have been more lighthearted and focused on just plot. This one was about heavier subjects (war, disease, death), it jumped around from story to story in different chapters, and the language just felt deeper and heavier (that's my really significant analytical skills for you). I'm really glad I read this and I definitely want to add this one to my "to buy" list now that I've finished the library copy.
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