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" How does an author go about conjuring a protagonist so brimming with idiosyncrasies and so aware of the world and its uniqueness as to render him impossibly endearing and triumphantly original? Ask Reif Larsen, the 28-year-old Brooklynite on whom the Penguin Press reportedly bestowed almost a million dollars for his really quite astounding debut novel, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet.  The story is simple enough: T. S., a science genius and compulsive cartographer who lives with his family of mixed nuts on a Montana ranch, wins a prestigious Smithsonian science award (except, the museum doesn&amp;#039;t know he&amp;#039;s only 12 years old) and hops an industrial rail to start a new life in DC. But here&amp;#039;s the icing on this already luscious piece of fiction: T. S.&amp;#039;s every digression, aside, distraction, and tangential musing is drawn\u2014by him, naturally\u2014in the margins of almost every page: his father&amp;#039;s long sips of whiskey over seconds elapsed, or a pie chart depicting &amp;quot;The Four Components of Adventure&amp;quot; (guns and knives, magnifying glasses, adventure pants\u2014and, of course, a map!). &amp;quot;Something about measuring the distance between here and there cast off the mystery of what lay between,&amp;quot; T. S. attests about his all-consuming fetish for mapmaking, &amp;quot;and as a child with limited empirical evidence, the unknown of what might just lie between here and there could be terrifying. I, like most children, had never been there. I had barely been here.&amp;quot; Funny: Isn&amp;#039;t that pretty exactly how you remember it? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a9043/book-release-the-selected-works-of-t-s-spivet-318137/>