Between the Bridge and the River

by Craig Ferguson

I don't particularly care for the cover of this book; I don't know why.

The praise from Mitch Albom written on the back cover should have been enough to deter me from reading this book (I read "Tuesdays with Morrie," liked it at the time but I won't read another book of his because it's a bunch of carpe diem crap that I don't want preached at me.).

This is an odd book, bordering on Christian fiction with a lot of smut and swearing mixed in. It's about redemption and God and psychology and not at all what I was expecting from Craig Ferguson.

Ferguson needed a better editor. There's a lot going on, a lot of characters, not all of whom stick around for the whole story, and a lot of unnecessary detail. It's as if Ferguson was really amused by his own thoughts and included them in the book just for himself. In the end, the characters end up being too tightly wound together, meeting each other in dreams or while walking the desert of their soul. It's too coincidental.

I wonder if this was a sort of healing book for Ferguson, the kind that the author writes at a difficult point in his life because it's the only way he can think of to make himself feel better, kind of like how T.S. Garp had to write "The World According to Bensenhaver" to get over his tragic loss.

All in all the book is amusing, a little "out there," but you can feel free to skip this one.