I had The Son in my Amazon shopping cart yesterday, but after reading Robin Wasserman’s review in the NYT Sunday Book Review this morning, I’m going over to the Harvard Bookstore this morning to buy a copy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/books/review/son-by-lois-lowry.html

Wasserman writes:

It’s love, though, that proves the most dangerous, with its inevitable companions, obligation, sacrifice and loss. Lowry, who lost her own son in 1995, surely understands these dangers all too well, and she writes heart-rendingly about the agony of absence and the injustice of loss. But Lowry’s son Grey was an Air Force pilot who died while on active duty, and so Lowry also understands — and imbues her book with — the great capacity of youth to believe in transforming the world, in sacrificing for a greater good, in defeating evil — no matter the cost. Her characters carry their burdens without complaint, embracing any risk to save the ones they love. And as love threatens to destroy them, it’s only love that can save them, that particular love of humanity that manifests as empathy. A powerful theme that runs throughout the quartet, empathy here claims center stage. To be able to imagine, or even experience, the inner life of another: In Lowry’s world, this is the ultimate redemptive force, the gift that makes us human. In our world, it’s the gift this book — and every book — offers us.

And somehow Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s compellingly austere pictorial style (the image below accompanied the review of The Son) seems the perfect visual analogue for Lois Lowry’s spare yet lustrous prose.