The Hour I First Believed

By: Wally Lamb

Narrated by: George Guidall

When high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, while Caelum is away, Maureen finds herself in the library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed. Miraculously, she survives. But when Caelum and Maureen flee to an illusion of safety on the Quirk family's Connecticut farm, they discover that the effects of chaos are not easily put right.

While Maureen fights to regain her sanity, Caelum discovers five generations' worth of diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings in his family's house. As unimaginable secrets emerge, Caelum grapples with the past and struggles to fashion a future from the ashes of tragedy. His quest for meaning is at once mythic and contemporary, personal and quintessentially American.

good but not Lamb's best

Bad: No small amount of distractions and gratuitous plot elements, especially in the latter part of the book. At times I felt like Lamb didn't quite know how to end this thing, so decided to pilot concepts for his next 2 or 3 books. Good: Lamb is an extraordinary writer, his prose direct yet somehow elegant. The narration was superlative. Despite some plot failings, I didn't want this audiobook to end.

Guidall is a genius. Tne book? Not so much.

Guidall does the best he can with this book. It's not the worst book I've listened to, and it does have a number of appealing factors. In the end, though, I'd rate it average or above average, at best.

A life reviewed

I love Walt Lamb’s writings. I listen while doing chores and this “reading” took place during the Uvalde shooting and the overturn of Row v wade. The juxtaposition of this book and the reality of today was unreal. Unexpected and beautiful. Hopefully beautiful- the book had a sad but good ending - will we? I thoroughly appreciated the thoughtfulness of this book. So good!

professor Lamb never disappoints

Loved it, start to finish. Lamb's novels are stories within stories and this is my favorite of all. Third time reading it and I still laughed and cried!!

Maybe too much story

There is a lot of story here. A lot. There is the time of the novel (late 1990s/early 2000s), a little while ago (1950s) and longer while ago (early 1900s) and lots of wayback (mid 1800s). Sure, it does all come together at some point, but I also felt the story wandering in a way that I wasn't sure if it would ever come back and if it did, would I even remember the tidbit of new info we learned in that ancient journal history and how it impacted the current day. There is also quite a bit of emotion in the book, too, and readers will be impacted differently based on their own life experiences.