A review of The Beard by Anderson Prunty

[Tonycole]

One of the things I do on my blog about everything to do with eReaders and eBooks is hunt for all manner of interesting and odd resources for us all, and a rich vein of treasure are the websites of self publishing authors.

I have found some real gems in this manner, and all for free too!

One of the most recent is a book called The Beard, by a fellow called Anderson Prunty (link to his blog [URL="http://www.andersenprunty.com/"].

He belongs to the school of writers known as Bizarro and this book is certainly bizarre!

The synopsis on the website doesn't really do this book justice, and I quote:

"Seven-year-old David Glum watches as his grandfather is abducted by a legendary herd of elephants. Twenty years later, David returns to his parents' home to focus on growing a beard, a goal he feels sure he can accomplish. Hilarity ensues."

The book starts in a reasonably calm way, with a rather touching description of a young boy and his relationship with his Grandfather, and nothing much about the first couple of pages gives one any reason to expect anything especially strange to happen in this book - to be honest, reading this chapter I began to think that perhaps my more or less random choice of a book had been a bad one. That is until the above mentioned elephants put in their appearance.

From that moment on, things became stranger and stranger by the minute. I shan't describe anything more of the plot, as this would take away the genuine pleasure that you will experience should you read this book - well, I hope you will experience pleasure reading it, I did.

Basically it is a tale of an anabasis, a voyage of self discovery and a very wry commentary on the world we live in. Also, it is an extremely enjoyable book to read. The further into it I got, the less easy I found it to put it down and get on with other things. It completely captivated me; all the various - and extremely strange - characters are surprisingly sympathetic and (this is a real achievement on Mr Prunty's part) believable. As is the wildly off-beat world they all inhabit.

I hope that others here will visit his blog and find out more of this rather remarkable author.

Should you wish to download it, you can best go to Smashwords website (which in itself is well worth a visit). https://www.smashwords.com/