The Shell Collector: a book review

Book title: The Shell Collector

Book author: Anthony Doerr

Inclusive and diverse!

Doerr’s characters are from all around the world. Of course some are from Idaho, where he lives. Others are from—less known islands in Kenya, from Tanzania, from Liberia, from Lithuania—places scattered in the world map. And so are the characters. A scientist, a blind man, someone who is deaf, some archaeologists. If you like to read the globe, read all the spectrum, The Shell Collector has a lot to offer to you!

Now coming to the plots. Doerr gets 10/10 for not making the stories predictable. He does not end them with fairy tale ending. He doesn’t even go to the end. He starts a story, takes the reader to the place and you expect this to happen, that to happen—those don’t happen, because his stories are as real as life—unexpected and un-fairy-tale-like.

Some stories touched my heart. But some I could not get into much—since the geography of his stories varied, I could not really understand some characters or their settings well. As it was difficult for me to feel their skin or weather. The ones I liked—The Shell Collector, The Hunter’s wife, Griselda’s story..  And the ones I loved very much—The Caretaker and Mkondo. Well, Africa definitely won my heart!

Years pass by the pages in his stories. The Caretaker was the story of a man from Liberia. His land gets sweeped with sand during the sand storm. And he had a mother. A garden in front of the house where the mother used to grow vegetables and sell them in the market twice a week. And then a war. Memories, a lifetime of nightmares. Doerr then carries the story in the deck of a cargo ship and sails the ship to some place in America. And then? I am not gonna give spoilers. But if I meet you some time and you want to hear a beautiful story, I bet I have one in my pocket. The feeling of reading a great story and the feeling of delivering the story to someone, ah!

And so was Mkondo. A girl as wild as Africa… who is in search of life. And she meets this archaeologist from Ohio, looking for the fossil of a dead bird. How to combine their worlds? Dead and alive. How to confine wild inside civil… I loooooved this story. So much so that I wondered if I am Mkondo myself and called my husband immediately, asking him if he wants to go to Tanzania with me and accompany me for trekking Kilimanjaro. He said maybe and maybe, because he knows I am serious and if he says yes, there is no way to stop me flying.

With this I had read all the books of my favorite author. His other short story collection “Memory Wall” had similar flavor too. I think I liked Shell Collector more. Maybe because I listened to Memory Wall and short stories are better when read.

If you are a fan of Doerr, welcome to Doerr’s unique short story world!