Sympathetic Reilly

Handling Sin by Michael Malone
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Challenges: TBR, A-Z (title)
Review: This is a big book, with a lot packed into it, so it's sort of hard to know what to say about it. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of The Pickwick Papers, with misunderstandings and coincidences, and the main characters sort of bumbling around and managing to get themselves into and out of trouble with seeming to really understand what was actually going on around them.

Similarly, the book reminded me a lot of A Confederacy of Dunces, at least in the beginning. There's the sort of curmudgeonly and generally disapproving Southern man, who looks with disdain at almost everything around him, and is convinced that he could do everything better if only he were allowed to run things.

What makes this book different from either of those two is that Malone actually allows his main character to grow and learn during the story. This made "our hero" an actually sympathetic character (as opposed to Toole's Reilly) and I actually cared about the end result of his enforced quest, if not everything that happened to him and his companions on the way.