His mother, a flapper who lived convinced that the next romance was going to be her ticket to riches, brought him to Mexico in the 1920s, but couldn’t be bothered to send him to school for years at a time. Shepherd is a perpetual outsider who essentially raised himself with some help from a kind cook. The national identities of Mexico and America are forged as Shepherd’s life is narrated through a compilation of journal entries, excerpts from memoirs, newspaper clippings – both real and fake – congressional testimony, and notes from Shepherd’s archivist. You will never look at rhubarb the same way again.) “The Lacuna” may be her most ambitious novel to date. (In between, she also published a bestselling memoir, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” about her family’s efforts to eat locally for one year. Kingsolver (“The Poisonwood Bible”), a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, explores those gaps and the way they can alter people’s lives in The Lacuna, her first novel in nine years. That piece, as author Barbara Kingsolver helpfully explains, is known as a lacuna. “The most important part of the story is the piece you don’t know,” he is fond of saying. The gap in Harrison William Shepherd’s personal narrative is big enough for a grown man to swim through. Everyone has plot holes in his life story.
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