Your Blue Eyed Boy

The response to any creative work

is subjective

necessarily so

inevitably.

But for a novel to work successfully

for any one of us

we must identify

with the characters,

feel for them,

care about them,

at least for one of them.

Surely that is true.

I always believed it.

So Dunmore’s “Your Blue Eyed Boy”

is an anomaly.

I don’t like any

of the characters.

Don’t identify with them or  with any part 

of their lives.

Don’t aspire

to any of it,

never did.

So why do these people reach into the core

of my being,

speak to me

so strongly,

touch me so 

deeply,

roll around my head like an ear worm.

I don’t understand it.

But they do.