You Shall Know Our Velocity - A Book by Dave Eggers

While You Shall Know Our Velocity is worth a read for fans of Eggers, it is not a good stand-alone novel for newcomers to his work. The work of Dave Eggers is broad in scope and covers a variety of relevant personal and political topics. Most of his books are quite gripping and nearly impossible to put down. This can be classified as one of those, but perhaps only for people who have already become familiar with his style, subjects and tone.

From his world-famous semi-autobiographical A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius to the semi-biographical What Is the What, Dave Eggers has a way of capturing the constant movement of things and the epic quality of extreme circumstances. In a way, these concerns come to a head (as the title suggests) in You Shall Know Our Velocity. While You Shall Know Our Velocity is an engaging and fast read like his other works, it seems somehow less realistic - probably because it isn't based on reality as much as his other books.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is based largely on Dave Eggers' own life experience and What Is The What draws on the true heart-wrenching tale of a young Sudanese refugee. You Shall Know Our Velocity is largely fictional and much more fantastical. This book follows the lives of two young men who travel the world in search of some form of (non-religious) salvation. While this isn't his strongest work, it does explore some new territory for dedicated fans of Eggers. Also, as with the other works of Eggers, a reader can't help but become invested in the characters and their fate in You Shall Know Our Velocity.

Still, people new to Eggers should start with What Is the What - it is definitively his best work. It catalogs the early life of a tragic main character, who starts out as part of an ordinary family only to have his world turned upside down in a single day when civil war comes to his village. From there on it becomes a tale of his fast-paced flight to safety - an educational and gripping page-turner through and through. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is also a potential place to start - given that it is the novel largely responsible for Eggers' current fame. To a person familiar with this work, You Shall Know Our Velocity becomes an interesting read in light of Dave Eggers' other novels, though it simply wouldn't be on any literary map without his prior successes.