Evan Mandery’s “Q”

I’m not the most sentimental human being. If my ruminations on self-help books didn’t prove this enough, suffice it to say that I am the sort of person that scrutinizes birth announcements for grammatical errors and Christmas card photos for egregious sweater choices. So, when someone very awesome gifted me a copy of Evan Mandery’s Q, my immediate thought was: I don’t do love stories.

This is where most reviews would say, “Oh, but Q is not a love story. It’s so much MORE!”

I’m not going to say that. Because it IS, at its core, a love story. Instead, I will say that, surrounded as it is by so many other delightful elements–devotion to the New York cityscape, the social implications of future time-traveling technology, even ruminations on historical topics like Freud’s psychoanalysis and America’s Reconstruction period–a love story like this one is made immensely more palatable. It was a book I tore through, and one that was, more than once, responsible for the rare phenomenon of Marnie Laughing Out Loud Whilst Riding the El Alone.