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Idiot! by Christopher Klim Hopewell Publications
book review by J. Alpha
"When they came for Thomas King, he was asleep, locked in a fantastic dream."
For readers looking to experience the pure and effortless joy of being drawn right into a novel within the first few pages, award-winning author/journalist, Christopher Klim's, latest novel Idiot! delivers a delightful read.
Set in the Pine Barrens forests of New Jersey and Cranfield Lakes, Idiot! is a page-turning and character driven story of small-town greed and corruption framed around the severely dyslexic and perceived village idiot, Thomas King, who is a forest ranger and "salvager of other peoples trash, a garbologist who made use of the things other people left behind."
The pairing of Tom with his old high school crush, Claire Wethers, a former beauty queen turned town drunk, becomes the dynamic core to which Klim attaches everything else in the story to help him create a powerful illusion of reality, despair, and hope in the readers mind.
And though Claire was a woman Tom had known for a lifetime, and yet she remained "a dream that would never be his in the flesh," Klim plausibly unites this unlikely pair as they break from their past lives of hardships to redeem a bankrupt town from a posse of local villains, greed, corruption, and itself.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review