Without of doubt, the books that connect with the reader, are the ones that make us feel emotions. Not just the over anxious feeling over turning what is going to happen on the next page, but joy, sadness, fear, and anger. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a memoir by Dave Eggers, is such a book.

In Lake Forest, Illinois, Dave Eggers, who is in his early twenties, and his siblings, Bill, Beth and Toph (age 8) endure the sudden death of their father due to lung cancer. Their mother dies a month later from stomach cancer after a long struggle. Afterwards, Dave, Beth and Toph move to California. Bill, who does not play a large role in the plot, eventually moves to Los Angeles. The rest of the family live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dave and Toph begin living on their own in a dilapidated, untamed fashion. Dave struggles between moments of feeling that his approach to parenting is calculated and brilliantly designed to make Toph well-adjusted, to worrying that his hands-off approach and commitment to personal projects will make Toph maladjusted. Dave’s own attempts to lead a normal life as a young adult often involve fairly ordinary encounters with women and alcohol, but are depicted by the author as somewhat surreal. Due to his parents’ death and his duty to take care of Toph, he feels robbed of his youth, and this fuels his pursuit of sex and irresponsibility. Trying to become the role model he wants to be for Toph, he opens a magazine called the “Might”, where he finds his true passion and where he began writing this memoir, writing.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a bold title for a young author’s first book, is beautifully written, laugh-out-loud, and utterly unforgettable book. With a voice that is uniquely comic, poignant, and philosophical, Eggers tells a truly heartbreaking–yet extremely enjoyable– story that many readers are sure to enjoy.