Most of what I want to say about Sky Daddy would spoil the afterword, which was a minor revelation for me. “Oh, jeeze.”
Set in San Francisco and viciously deadpan about it.
bookwyrm posts from 2026
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A lovely coming-of-age (I learned from a Bookwyrm post that you can call these a Bildungsroman) New York City story with a lot of heart. Another reviewer called it a “funny-sad” which: yeah it’s that too. While I also more than enjoyed Auster’s similar 4, 3, 2, 1, in this case, the same kind of story (or, one quarter of the same kind of story), follows someone just under two years older than me to New York City so rather than the former’s dips into period-overexposure I had lots of “yes, hello” moments. I’m not a nostalgic person but that was a nice personal bonus.
(Also Cheers gets another well deserved tip of the hat in Beautyland, like it did in Exit Zero.)
