Review: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

I will admit — I was a little concerned whether I should read this book or not. The fact that man has a mountain for a father and his mother is a washing machine says that Doctorow is taking things to the limit. But I found myself in the library, looking for someone to read, so I decided to give it a shot.

Well, the guy does have strange parents, and the rest of his family isn’t normal either. But that didn’t distract from the story, mostly because Doctorow and his characters don’t try to explain it. It just is. The other plot-line in the story is interesting as well — the main character, Alan, gets himself involved with a group that wants to put free wireless Internet throughout Toronto. It’s this plot-line that Doctorow is at his best. Some may say that he tried to put his personal philosophy in it and made it preachy. Well, I happen to agree with his personal philosophy on this, so I didn’t think that it’s preachy. This part reminds me of Neal Stephenson at his best, except not as long-winded. And I think it is high compliments.

The most confusing thing in the book is that Alan and his brothers (the children of the mountain and the washing machine) don’t really keep their names throughout the book. The same characters call them different names in the same paragraphs. The only thing that helps is that the names always start with the same letters — Alan’s names always start with ‘A’, Brian’s starts with ‘B’, etc. It is important to the story and the characters, but it sure makes things hard to follow in part.

A fair review of this book has to say that Doctorow released the text of this, and his other books under the Creative Commons. You can download this at [his website](http://craphound.com/someone/).

I give this book 4/5 stars. But just because it’s short doesn’t mean that it’s a light and easy read.