In the street where you live is there a bizarre mixture of characters such as a stripper, a Russian mathematician writing a thesis about the trajectories of fish, a depressed ex-musician bringing up the son of a Mexican singer, a gay couple so afraid of what their neighbours might think they never go out of the house together? I doubt it. If there aren't any normal people, how do you know the others are weird? The only vaguely real character in this fairy tale (not sure what else to call it) is the eleven year old whose story this is, who is about to become the fourteeth (I think, I was never very good at remembering numbers) boy at his school whose parents have split up. It is strange that the only vaguely real character is the only one not to be named, and the last page of the book makes it clear this was deliberate, though I don't really see the point of it as a literary device. The other characters, who start off being unlikely and end up being implausible, have names like Alexandra and Alexandria (twins) and Alexis and Alex (parent/child). What is that all about? Very French, I'd say. Oddity for the sake of oddity. I wonder if the storyteller was called Alexander?
I struggled a little with the translation, which seemed to produce an English text that was just slightly off. I also struggled with the "ice storm," and ice falling from the sky, because it is outside my experience. Here we would call it freezing rain, and it would be moderate compared to this humdinger.
I can see that the book was probably meant to make you feel happy but it was all a bit overdone. I mean, things turned out well for everybody, including highly peripheral characters like the headmistress with the broken coccyx. The book had its funny moments, and not always where the author intended comedy, I think, but it was all very unsatisfying. Even in fairy tales you have shade, some dark to make the light shine brighter. This story was, if anything, twee. Even if I hadn't read it before, it read like a cliche, all loose ends tied up, everyone living happily ever after. I was left wondering what the point of it all was. There didn't seem to be any sort of message or philosophy unless it's of the 'every cloud has a silver lining' sort or it's that (to paraphrase the stripper because I can't remember the actual words) love is like a taxi which, if it doesn't stop when you run after it, is already taken (which isn't even true, of course).
This was a very slight book, slight in length, slight in story, characterisation or meaning. A wimpy sort of book that didn't really say anything. Still, as Kurt Vonnegut might have said, it was mostly harmless. But I still wonder what the point was.