Two lawyer brothers thought they had left their Maine childhood behind, when one day they receive a call from the sister they left behind. The news isn't good: her son, their nephew, had thrown a pig's head through a mosque frequented by their hometown's burgeoning Somali refugee population. As a result, the brothers must go back home and, in doing so, confront long-buried -- and misunderstood -- truths of their childhood.I'm a sucker for this kind of realistic fiction. Strout lets you intimately know the characters in this book, particularly the younger Burgess boy, Bob. But I think what drew me in even more was the relevance of the subject matter. Some Maine towns are, indeed, reeling from an influx of refugees, and the different culture from which they came. It's an issue that the whole country is now dealing with as a result of the current crisis in Syria (not to mention Yemen, Sudan, Myanmar, etc. etc.) The ending might have been a bit too tidy for me, but this book nevertheless had me reading long past my bedtime.
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