Oh man.

I laughed, a lot. Then at the end I cried. Seriously. A lot of books SAY that they’ll make you laugh and cry, but the books that have made me laugh out loud I could count on one hand… and I can only think of one other book that made me cry. The Catalpa Tree by Denyse Devlin (incredible book, by the way).

It’s an epistolary novel, written through letters, telegrams, transcripts of sessions with his therapist, newspaper articles, etc.  A story of a Jewish kid in Brooklyn during WWII - Joey Margolis. He gets sent to Juvy for peeing the in reservoir and is a pathological liar.  The kid finds a hero in a rookie baseball player and tracks down his home address and his girlfriends address in order to make friends with him. He is in correspondence with the White House and ends up playing sax with Louis Armstrong.

There is all kinds of quirky aspects of the story that endears me to it further, yet are completely ridiculous, I like that sort of thing. But mostly, it’s just sweet as fucking pie and it made me cry.

LOVED it.