The Book of Form and Emptiness

Benny Oh is 13 when his father dies lying drunk in the alley, mistaken for garbage, and run over by a chicken truck. It upends his small family's life. Benny begins to hear objects — the anxious buzz of fluorescent lights, the screaming of coffee beans, the arrogant chatter of coins. Meanwhile his mother Annabelle can't stop seeing the potential in things — old shirts that can become a quilt, the promise of potential in a Michaels store, the perfect world contained in the snow globes bought on eBay. But their relationships to objects is a bit broken. Benny can't shut out the malevolent insistence of scissors and plunges them into his leg and Annabelle becomes a full blown hoarder.

It's up to Benny and the Book, the one the reader is holding in his hands, breaking the literary fourth wall and speaking to us, to unravel the story. It's one that involves the library, a recovering drug addict named The Aleph, a wheelchair bound Slovakian poet known as the Bottleman, ferret sky burials, a backyard murder of crows, a Marie Kondo stand-in and the pervasive question of what is real.

There's a lot going on here, wild digressions, unresolved questions, weird meanderings that render the whole thing a bit shaggy but it is ultimately a hopeful book suffused with Zen sensibility.