A painful story of a dysfunctional family plagued by mental illness, Housekeeping is nonetheless beautifully written and highly evocative. Two young sisters Ruth and Lucille are left alone when their unmoored mother dumps them at their grandmother’s house at a tender age, and then proceeds to drive herself off a cliff and into a lake, the same lake that her own father—a dreamy, frustrated, and regret-filled man–had died in following a train wreck years earlier. Their aged Nona is a loving and gentle caregiver, but […]
Meh
This novel is not just a stream but rather a flood of consciousness, narrated by a woman who needs the help of mental health professionals. While I appreciate that the narrator reveals her state of mind to us with her endless, run-on rumination, as a reader, I just found it wearying after a while. And in the end, I’m not sure what to make of the odyssey of Elyria, a 28-year-old woman, writer for soap operas, unhappily married, trying to lose herself. Elyria has been […]
A Glamorous Tragedy
This YA novel, inspired in part by the life of Edie Sedgwick, follows the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of Addison Stone, an 18-year-old art phenom from Rhode Island who makes a huge splash on the NYC art scene before her untimely death. The story itself is bold and fast-paced (much like Addy) if a bit far fetched at times. Set in the current day, emails, Instagram photos of characters, and pictures of actual art works are peppered throughout the narrative, giving it a surprisingly […]
A Tale for the Time Being
A Tale for the Time Being is a novel about Zen Buddhism, quantum physics, writers and readers, writer’s block and reader’s block, hate and love. It moves fluidly through the past and present and involves some dynamic and admirable female protagonists. Small wonder it was nominated for the 2013 Man Booker Prize (and should have won instead of The Luminaries). The narration moves back and forth between Ruth, a present-day middle-aged writer living on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia, and Nao, […]