book data
48 ratings,
3.23
average rating, 10 reviews
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published
May 13th 2002
by Henry Holt and Co.
(first published 2002)
details
Hardcover, 256 pages
isbn
0805070648
(isbn13: 9780805070644)
description
Clare Menges is the twenty-nine-year-old suburban mother of three, but her comfortable world is disrupted when her best friend’s lover appears in he…more
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 78)
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5 stars (7)
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4 stars (13)
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3 stars (17)
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2 stars (6)
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1 star (5)
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avg 3.23
editions: all | this edition
editions: all | this edition
Read in February, 2009
The main issue in this book is sort of a love triangle between Clare, the main character, Helly, her best friend, and a man that is now with Helly, but was intimate with Clare a long time ago. It's not necessarily a love triagle because Clare is married with children and she wants to stay dedicated, but it does complicate things a lot. The book switches around a lot and looks at the other complex and messed up situations in other parts of Clare's family, like her father being re-married three ...more
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Read in December, 2007
Tessa Hadley forced me to rethink the idea of "family." Accidents in the Home demonstrates how ex-wives, half-siblings, the child of ex-husband, stepmother(s), stepgrandmother, all could melt into a family, essentially defined by this novel as people-accidentally-connected-by-marital-relations-but-are-nevertheless-loyal-to-one-another-and-constant-in-their-loyalty-and-love.
It does remind me of the first family here. :)
It does remind me of the first family here. :)
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Read in May, 2008
I love all of Tessa Hadley's books. She writes so beautifully about women's lives, and the hard-to-put-into-words emotions that seem both confusing and universal. Whenever I read her I recognize myself in her characters, even though my outer life is very different from theirs: a cause for celebration, and one that always makes me feel companioned and comforted.
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Read in July, 2009
I particularly liked the description of how one of the characters went about disengaging from her husband in anticipation of launching into an affair. It's not clear whether the affair is ever consummated but the marriage ends anyway. It's a small part of the book but particularly resonant to me...
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Read in September, 2008
I've read and loved short stories by Tessa Hadley in the New Yorker, but I haven't been so crazy about her novel. It contains some of the same wonderful observations of one's inner life that Hadley has done before. The plot involved many different characters in an extended family, and I couldn't keep them straight. Apparently others couldn't either since she included a genealogy at the front of the book. While I thought that the focus on the individual dissatisfactions of the characters was inte...more
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Another good read...well-written, in-depth portrait of the complications of modern families/love lives.
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Not bad. It has the feeling of a Joanna Trollope novel with a dollop of Iris Murdoch. The drawback is that there are too many characters in too short a book. Either cut down on the cast, or make the book a lot longer and spend more time with each.
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Complex and harsh at times. I may not have finished it if it weren't required for a class. I'm glad I did, though, because it contained one of the most beautiful gestures of love I've ever read.
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