Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Alan sanded the house on Wales Avenue..." (more)
Key Phrases: Someone Comes, Someone Leaves Town, Queen Street (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. It's only natural that Alan, the broadminded hero of Doctorow's fresh, unconventional SF novel, is willing to help everybody he meets. After all, he's the product of a mixed marriage (his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine), so he knows how much being an outcast can hurt. Alan tries desperately to behave like a human being—or at least like his idealized version of one. He joins a cyber-anarchist's plot to spread a free wireless Internet through Toronto at the same time he agrees to protect his youngest brothers (members of a set of Russian nesting dolls) from their dead brother who's now resurrected and bent on revenge. Life gets even more chaotic after he becomes the lover and protector of the girl next door, whom he tries to restrain from periodically cutting off her wings. Doctorow (Eastern Standard Tribe) treats these and other bizarre images and themes with deadpan wit. In this inventive parable about tolerance and acceptance, he demonstrates how memorably the outrageous and the everyday can coexist. Agent, Russell Galen. (May 5)
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From Booklist

Middle-aged entrepreneur Alan, for whom mother is a washing machine and father is a mountain, has moved into one of Toronto's more interesting neighborhoods. The brother Alan and his other brothers killed years ago has returned to hound the family, and those other brothers, who are nesting dolls, show up on Alan's doorstep starving because the innermost brother has vanished. A next-door neighbor has wings that her boyfriend cuts back regularly so she can pass for normal. In the midst of such ordinary oddness, getting involved in a scheme to provide free wireless Internet to the neighborhood and eventually the city seems reasonable, even when it's masterminded by a crusty punk whose gear comes from Dumpster diving. Eventually, Alan concludes that he must go back to the mountain, a home he hasn't visited in years. The combination of Alan facing up to his family and their strangeness, the damage his dead brother will do to everything Alan cares about, and Doctorow's inescapable technological enthusiasm eventuates in a lovely, satisfying tale. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books (June 16, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765312786
• ISBN-13: 978-0765312785
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #905,819 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Novel About Connectivity Needs More Connectivity, July 23, 2006

By	doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (Paperback)

Cory Doctorow really has his finger on today's high-tech pulse, leading to great sci-fi ideas. I have read one of his earlier efforts, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," and that novel was damaged by too much reliance on techno geekery and not enough story. In this book, Doctorow has endeavored more to construct an engaging plot and more interesting characters, with the high-tech acting as more of a backdrop. This book is fun to read and even suspenseful, and the reading experience is an overall success. However, there are some glaring gaps here. The lead character (usually known as Alan) and his brothers are weird extra-human constructs, with a mountain for a father and a washing machine for a mother, and come from a supernatural cave looked over by golems. Alan enters the world of average humans, trying to escape his one evil brother, and protect his other brothers, while meeting a winged woman named Mimi who may or may not come from the same extra-human realm.

This may all sound eccentrically creative on Doctorow's part, but the problem is that these weird characters and bizarre backgrounds are simply presented as a given, and never actually explained. Are they supernatural demigods, weird mutant freaks, aliens, or what? Their function in the world of regular humans is never explored, nor is there any explanation for the supporting characters who know their secrets (Krishna) or can accept them without judgment or questioning (Kurt). Also, the characters go about their actions with no underlying motives or motivations being made clear to the reader. This problem applies especially to Mimi and the evil brother. And finally, Doctorow was obviously trying to tie the main storyline, of Alan trying to integrate into regular society while fixing his extra-human family's problems, to the secondary storyline of a community effort to build a free wireless network. But these two plotlines never find true connectivity, and with many loose ends all around, the book sometimes feels like a jumble of loose ideas. Granted, this novel earns its props for being fun to read and for making you care what happens to the characters. But Doctorow needs more practice in fleshing out his unique ideas into a truly integrated and empathetic story. [~doomsdayer520~]

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I couldn't stop reading, October 17, 2006

By	Jess Bluejay "Bluejay" - See all my reviews

The first thing I read by Cory Doctorow was a short story called "Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers." I loved that story's confrontation between an anti-technology deep green society and a technocratic world. I haven't read much from the cyberpunk wing of the sci-fi genre but I get the idea that Doctorow enjoys playing with some of its conventions. He really seems to enjoy it in Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. The book weaves two stories together, one of them concerning the main character's involvement with a bunch of punks and anarchists working together on a free WiFi project. That sounds cyberpunky, but he subverts the usual conventions in a few key ways, one being that there isn't any discussion of a virtual world. It's set in the real world with elements of fantasy. Another is that the main character is not an anarchist or a punk. He doesn't have a mohawk, facial piercings, or tattoos. He also doesn't have a belly button. Because even though he seems to be an almost too-normal middle-aged man, the main character isn't even human. This brings us to the other main thread of the novel: the story of the main character's family. His name is Alan, but he'll answer to anything that starts with "A." Doctorow refers to him using several different "A" names. His father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine. For Doctorow this isn't just a dry metaphor for fatherhood and motherhood, though it humorously works on that level. (The mountain stands in for the larger-than-life yet aloof father and the washing machine plays the part of the dependent wife-maid). An even greater achievement is how real Doctorow makes this ridiculous premise seem. (I almost cried for the mother who was unable to truly nurture her children). The story of Alan's family is filled with rich and recognizable feeling, despite the absolute fantasy of the surface. Alan's been trying to fit in his entire life, but it's impossible. He was born in a washing machine, grew up in a cave, and is being stalked by his dead zombie-brother! Normality is most definitely unattainable. I'm not going to give anything else away. I ate this book up and highly recommend it. If I had to compare it to something, I'd call it a sci-fi version of Geek Love. The only thing that sucks about the book is the cover. The character on the cover is supposed to be Mimi, a young winged woman who lives in the house next to Alan's. Doctorow specifically describes Mimi as fat and sexy and this gal on the cover is in no way fat. The cover is annoying and if I'd seen it I probably wouldn't have read it. It looks like a Francesca Lia Block book, and her covers always suck, particularly the headless naked torsos of Violet and Claire. So anyway, definitely don't judge this book by its cover. It's much better than Down and Out...

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining, quirky fantasy, August 6, 2005

By	Elisabeth Carey (Lawrence, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Even after my disappointment with Eastern Standard Tribe, this still looked really interesting, and this time I wasn't disappointed.

Alan (Andy, Adrian) is the son of a mountain and a washing machine, and he has seven brothers. Alan (Alex, Andreas) is the oldest, and also the one who can pass for human the most easily and comfortably. In fact, only gradually do we learn that there's anything unusual about him at all, except for his parentage and his casual attitude about what name he gives people-as long as it starts with "A". Billy (Bob, Ben) can see the future, Carlo is an island, Doug (Danny,) was a perfectly human-appearing monster until his brothers killed him (which hasn't slowed down his career much), and Ed, Fred, and George are nesting dolls. Alan got his early-childhood care and education from the golems provided by his father, the mountain, and then discovered school and the library. After a childhood attempting to raise his brothers (except for Carlo) with decent educations and the ability to blend in to human society, and after a truly horrific experience ending in the death of Doug, Alan takes off on his own. When we meet him, he's a middle-aged, semi-retired entrepreneur living in Toronto, renovating the house he just bought and getting acquainted with the college-age neighbors next door.

His illusions of normality are about to take a nasty hit.

On the one hand, he's getting sucked into a new project, making free wireless internet access available to the neighborhood, the city, and eventually the world. On the other hand, his brothers, Ed, Fred, and George come to visit, with the news that Doug, whom they thought was safely dead, is back and coming after them. And on the third hand, the kids next door aren't as normal as they look, either. As his brothers start dying and Doug starts collecting allies, Alan clings to his version of normality and pitches free wireless internet access to Bell Canada and tiny city merchants and anarchist bookstore operators, and tries to convince the girl next door that wings aren't a handicap. (Silly Alan; Mimi wants to be normal, too!)

All of this could be a recipe for a disaster of a book, and occasionally it does seem to almost spin out of Doctorow's control-but not quite. Somehow it all gels. These characters are fleshed out and interesting, and the story, alternating in time between Alan's strange childhood and his not-quite-normal middle age, is fully developed and absorbing. I'm never going to be Cory Doctorow's biggest fan, but I recommend this one to anyone who enjoys quirky fantasy.