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The Sun Collective
The Sun Collective: A Novel | Charles Baxter
1 post | 1 read | 2 to read
From the National Book Award finalist and one of our most gifted writers (Chicago Tribune)a timely and unsettling novel about the people drawn to and unmoored by a local activist group more dangerous than it appears Once a promising actor, Tim Brettigan has gone missing. His father thinks he may have seen him among some homeless people. And though she knows he left on purpose, his mother has been searching for him all over the city. She checks the usual placeschurches, storefronts, benchesand stumbles upon a local community group with lofty goals and an enigmatic leader who will alter all of their lives. Christina, a young woman rapidly becoming addicted to a boutique drug that gives her a feeling of blessedness, is inexplicably drawn to the same collective by a man whos convinced he may start a revolution. As the lives of these four characters intertwine, a story of guilt, anxiety, and feverish hope unfolds in the city of Minneapolis. A vision of modern American society and the specters of the consumerism, fanaticism, and fear that haunt it, The Sun Collective captures both the mystery and the violence that punctuate our daily lives.
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review
Billypar
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Mehso-so

I've heard good things about Charles Baxter, but I should have started with one of the works he's known for instead of his latest, which is one that almost works but not quite. It's got an intriguing plot involving a middle-aged couple concerned for their missing son who may have gotten involved in a group called The Sun Collective, which is split between community service and radical violence. There's a bit of magical realism I also enjoyed 👇

Billypar The biggest problem is how Baxter mistakes the activism of the present younger generation for a thinly disguised version of the 1960s radical left movement, which made the portions focused on the younger main characters ring false. Those characters also seemed thinner in general - it would have been better to stick with the older couple's perspective and get more editorial input on the younger characters from readers of a similar age. 9mo
Billypar It also features some cringy satire involving a president that is a Trump stand-in named...wait for it...Amos Alonzo Thorkelson 😵‍💫 9mo
Leftcoastzen OMG that name! Really?!? 9mo
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Billypar @Leftcoastzen I couldn't make that up. And he wants people to call him 'Coach' as a nickname 😅 9mo
Aimeesue Great review. I started to notice the IRL attempts to paint BLM activists as equivalent to 60‘s radical leftists as soon as the protests started. All the "oh no, antifa" pearl-clutching was ridiculous. Can people really not tell the difference? 9mo
Billypar @Aimeesue Right? It doesn't seem like something you need to squint to distinguish. It's true that Baxter is writing from the left politically, so it comes across a bit like a cautionary tale. But it's pretty clearly set in present-day society, so that makes it seem more like a misread of the current political environment. 9mo
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