King’s award winning novel, Letters To Alice, receives a wonderful review from its judge for yet another literary contest sponsored by Writer’s Digest! Check out the review:
In LETTERS TO ALICE, King Grossman gives us a profoundly interesting character in Frazier Pickett III, who calls himself “the slumbering man.” He’s a writer who can’t write anymore, and in some ways he reminds me of Leonard Schiller, the blocked novelist protagonist of Brian Morton’s wonderful novel STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING. But LETTERS TO ALICE is also the story of the woman who inspired Boris Pasternak to get his manuscript for DOCTOR ZHIVAGO out of Russia, and it’s one of the most impressive things about Grossman’s book that he manages to spin these two storylines side by side as adroitly and adeptly as he does. The book is a long and delicious binge, and the writing is very solid and engaging throughout. The characters live and breathe, and the dialogue is rich and believable. The book’s cover design is striking and apt; the interior design is also quite good, though perhaps the font is a bit small for these old eyes. But that’s a very minor complaint about a book which otherwise impresses me greatly. The seamlessness of the narrative is what’s most remarkable—this must’ve involved a lot of research, and the seams absolutely do not show. The book’s effortlessness is kind of miraculous, actually.