Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese

Talk about falling in love with characters! Verghese's gift is making you love someone in 3 paragraphs or less. There wasn't a single character that you didn't care about here, no matter how small of a role they played. In fact, it was some of the minor characters that added that certain je ne sais quoi to this book for me, particularly Almaz (with her undying love and devotion to the doctors of Missing hospital), the Staff Probationer and Tsige (with their undying sense of responsibility/gratitude/indebtedness to Marion), and Deepak (with just plain brilliance). Of course, I loved Marion and his adoptive parents Hema and Ghosh most of all. And I hated Stone, Shiva, and Genet... but you can't hate a character without them being worthwhile enough to love them in their literary capacity. And I guess I loved them too because I cared what happened to them and kept rooting for them to right their wrongs.

Shiva, Marion's twin was fascinating. So brilliant but contained in his own mind. I am not sure about Marion's assessment that he only had the ability to look forward... he had a terrible sense of consequences for someone able to look forward.

I do tend to love "buildings roman" novels, which this is. I also tend to not like overblown, dramatic plots, which this is. But while I could not forgive Hosseini's "The Kite Runner"'s overload of plot coincidences, I did forgive it here. Even though there were a number of pretty unbelievable dramatic happenings, it flowed naturally enough that I bought it. Plus, it does seem like the Ethiopian community in New York/Boston might be fairly small, so chance happenings are not impossible.

I loved the historical backdrop in Ethiopia. I loved the medical details, although the surgical descriptions had a gross-out factor for me. I loved the writing. I loved the tease of being told where a certain segment of the story was going, but then being forced to wait out a pertinent tangent in the story before getting to the conclusion of the main segment. That definitely made for some fast reading of a long book... but I hope I didn't miss any particularly good portions by reading TOO fast!

So, overall, this book gets an A and a strong recommendation from me.