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Book Review of Life Expectancy

Life Expectancy
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Jimmy Tock comes into the world on the very night his grandfather leaves it. As a violent storm rages outside the hospital, Rudy Tock spends long hours walking the corridors between the expectant fathers' waiting room and his dying father's bedside. It's a strange vigil made all the stranger when, at the very height of the storms fury, Josef Tock suddenly sits up in bed and speaks coherently for the first and last time since his stroke. What he says befor he dies is that there will be five dark days in life of his grandson-five dates whose terrible events Jimmy will have to prepare himself to face. The first is to occur in his twentieth year; the second in his twenty-third year; the third in his twenty-eighth; the fourth in his twenty-ninth; the fifth in his thirtieth. Rudy is all too ready to discount his father's last words as a dying man's delusional rambling. But then he discovers that Josef also predicted the time of his grandson's birth to the minute, as well as his exact height and weight, and the fact Jimmy would be born with syndactyly-the unexplained anomaly of fused digits-on his left foot. Suddenly the old man's predictions take on a chilling significance. What terrifying events events await Jimmt on these five dark days? what nightmares will he face? What challenges must he survive? As the novel unfolds, picking up Jimmy's story at each of these crises points, the path he must follow will defy every expectation. And with each crises he faces, he will move closer to a fate he never cuold have imagined. For who Jimmy Tock is and what he must acomplish on the five days when his world turns is a mystery as dangerous as it is wonderous-a struggle against an evil so dark and pervasive, only the most extraordinary of human spirits can shine through.