Friday, August 13, 2021

I think it had a star on the cover?

I recently saw a meme (see #3) that brought back memories of working at Taylor’s bookstore during college. Whenever a customer mentioned they’d seen a book on Oprah, we’d pull out our microfiche (remember those?) and search for books mentioned on a recent show.

These days, you’d think finding a book whose title you’d forgotten would be one Google search away.

It wasn't. 

When I typed “novel about a boy who lives with his celebrity father for the summer,” the top search results were links to the movie Secondhand Lions and the book Beautiful Boy. The third result was a link to an article entitled “Finding a book when you’ve forgotten it’s title.” Thanks, Google.

Thinking I may have read this book when we lived in Ann Arbor, I went to the Ann Arbor Library catalog and searched for divorce, dysfunctional families, and movie star fathers. No dice. Then I tried the “Authors similar to” lists on Goodreads. Matthew Norman, Jonathan Tropper, and Tom Perrotta. Nope.

After these fruitless searches, I created a post on this forum.

Less than 24 hours later, the mystery was solved. Thanks to Brenna, who correctly identified the book as Blind Sight by Meg Howrey. Since I love Howrey’s other books, I hope it will be as good as I remember.

 (Incidentally, her book The Wanderers does have stars on the cover.)


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