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The Boy: A Novel
by
Lara Santoro
"Gorgeous, fiercely intelligent, deeply honest, and incredibly entertaining." ---Anne Lamott
Anna has always been a risk-taker and a free spirit, but now she is raising a young daughter on her own and she has to play it safe. Her twenty-something neighbor with the slow, easy smile is in no way part of Anna's plans. She resists temptation in every way she can, yet Anna is so...more
Anna has always been a risk-taker and a free spirit, but now she is raising a young daughter on her own and she has to play it safe. Her twenty-something neighbor with the slow, easy smile is in no way part of Anna's plans. She resists temptation in every way she can, yet Anna is so...more
Hardcover, 192 pages
Published
January 15th 2013
by Little, Brown and Company
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First of all, let me just stress this point --> I did not like the main character.
Still, the way the author manically forced me in the direction of utter hate toward this character’s choices made a hell of an unattractive motive.
I am not a child. I am a grown woman who understands life, love, and family. I have a wonderful mother that would have made the world turn in a different direction if I willed it so. In other words, I understand the importance of motherhood, I understand the obligatio...more
Still, the way the author manically forced me in the direction of utter hate toward this character’s choices made a hell of an unattractive motive.
I am not a child. I am a grown woman who understands life, love, and family. I have a wonderful mother that would have made the world turn in a different direction if I willed it so. In other words, I understand the importance of motherhood, I understand the obligatio...more
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There is so much to appreciate in "The Boy": rich dialogue, witty humor, and the way the seasons and the landscape are woven into the fabric of the story line. "The Boy" transported me to New Mexico- to clear air, mountains, sensuality, the Rio Grande, wide-open spaces, a vast sky and deep emotion. Santoro skillfully reveals the fierce love that is ever-present when coming to terms with difficult choices. Though some may say this story is about bad parenthood and addiction, Anna's journey is tha...more
"Things happen, things that shouldn't, things that respect no law, follow no method, assist no function, and are, in spirit and essence, nothing but madness-the cutting loose of the individual from the collective soul."
When I ordered this book for the library, the reviews made me curious enough that I put it on hold. Then it sat on my desk for a week and became an unexpected yet fascinating sociological study. Almost everyone that came into my office brought it up. Just from the cover alone, the...more
When I ordered this book for the library, the reviews made me curious enough that I put it on hold. Then it sat on my desk for a week and became an unexpected yet fascinating sociological study. Almost everyone that came into my office brought it up. Just from the cover alone, the...more
The pendulum has swung the other way. At the height of the feminist movement, women who only wanted to stay at home and raise their children were ridiculed; they were abettors of the patriarchal system, living only half lives. We who were girls during the late 60s and 70s were told we could do anything and have everything. We could be not just teachers and nurses, but astronauts, doctors, lawyers and journalists. We could be mothers, too, as long as that role took second billing to our careers....more
New favorite thing: Wake up on a day with a windchill in the negatives, don fleece leisure wear, peek out the window while bagel toasts and say to self “Today I will read a book in its entirety.” Tramp knee-high boot slippers back upstairs to the bedroom, turn it to a radio station where the only lyrics you might hear will be sung in Italian by people with exquisite diaphragm control, slip between so-soft sheets purchased at awesome kiosk during the holiday season, fire up Kindle app on iPad and...more
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The Boy By Lara Santoro Anna lives with her little girl Eva in New Mexico. After bizarre snips of conversation with even more off the wall characters, Anna is described as a free spirit who has left her cheating ex husband who resides in England. After much difficulties in every area of her life Anna has decided to focus completely on her daughter who ironically takes care of her mother much more than the other way around. Until, The Boy. The Boy who is the twenty year old son of her good friend...more
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Summary:
Once a free spirit who refused to be tied down, Anna is a forty-something single mother trying to put her life together after a bitter divorce. She crosses paths with a twenty-year-old neighbor who could not be more wrong for her—and her life suddenly has a new focus.
She is drawn to his youth, his easy grace, and his freedom from the constraints that rule her existence. Though she resists temptation in every way she can, Anna is soon engaged in a reckless and obsessive affair. The conseq...more
3.5
This book was totally not what I expected. It caught me off guard, and I felt like I was playing catch-up the entire time I read it. It isn’t a topic I have ever read written before, in this style or from this angle. There are so many stories, within stories, within stories, and the plot causes you to constantly question the characters motives and your own moral compass. At one point I wondered if I was smart enough to be reading it, often I questioned my emotional response to what was happen...more
This book was totally not what I expected. It caught me off guard, and I felt like I was playing catch-up the entire time I read it. It isn’t a topic I have ever read written before, in this style or from this angle. There are so many stories, within stories, within stories, and the plot causes you to constantly question the characters motives and your own moral compass. At one point I wondered if I was smart enough to be reading it, often I questioned my emotional response to what was happen...more
Anna is a real woman, not an imaginary "good" mother. She has a child, she is alone after a bitter relationship with her daughter's father, and now she longs for a life of her own. She commits the apparently unforgivable sin of falling in love, maybe even just lust, with a man. What? A woman, a mother, in lust? Because he is 20 and she is 42, this seems to make her a monster -- in the eyes of others, her own, her housekeeper's, even her therapist's. She struggles, no tangles, with the guilt, the...more
Brutally honest... I guess. Sexually riveting... not so much. A bit disorganized in its format of the story itself... YES! A mother who left her child with a nanny not because she had to work, but because she wanted to get away from her kid because she couldn't handle her infant crying anymore! As honest as that was, it wasn't enough to get me to enjoy the rest of the book. From the beginning, it jumped back and forth between the past and the present so many times that I felt dizzy and couldn't...more
Anna, a 40 something old journalist, lives outside of Taos, New Mexico with her precocious daughter, Eva. Anna meets her neighbor's son, a 20-year-old, Ivy-League dropout who comes on to her at a party. Despite warnings from her therapist, her housekeeper, and even her 8 year-old daughter, Anna cannot stay clear of the boy. Their affair naturally leads to disaster. I was confused as to why Anna would place lives in balance for a young man that seems to detest. Santoro never offers an explanation...more
The title is misleading. I thought it was a romance story of an older woman & a younger man but it's mainly about the dysfunctional relationship between the mother & daughter. The 'boy' is merely a supporting character.
Did I like the book? Yes, very much so. The heroine is a divorced, single mom who is battling alcoholism and trying, unsuccessfully, to become a better parent. This book showed to me the sacrifices one makes in their personal & sexual freedom to become a better parent....more
Did I like the book? Yes, very much so. The heroine is a divorced, single mom who is battling alcoholism and trying, unsuccessfully, to become a better parent. This book showed to me the sacrifices one makes in their personal & sexual freedom to become a better parent....more
This book was awful. I did not like the writing style of the author at all. She did not really go into any real detail about anything. I was left to piece together things that I shouldn't have had to piece together. I gave this book two stars because there were times when I would get into the story, but just as I was getting into the plot, it would go back to being fague. I had re-read some parts over and over again. The ending left the reader hanging, which leads be to believe there may be a se...more
Nov 22, 2012
Brooke Banks
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
contemporary fans, mature readers
I won this in a First Reads Giveaway.
I loved this book so much, every part of it. I was hooked in from the very first page anddidn't couldn't put it down until after I had finished it; after I sat stunned for some time by the ending.
Even if you've read similar plots, I'd still suggest picking up this book. It's written so beautifully. It's practically poetic in starkly highlighting the deep, dark reality too many people experience, and too few admit. It's not a pleasant or happy story. It's a...more
I loved this book so much, every part of it. I was hooked in from the very first page and
Even if you've read similar plots, I'd still suggest picking up this book. It's written so beautifully. It's practically poetic in starkly highlighting the deep, dark reality too many people experience, and too few admit. It's not a pleasant or happy story. It's a...more
I'm not sure I understood what this book was trying to say. In its short 190 pages, THE BOY felt frenetic and disjointed, while employing biblical references, and also trying to invoke Anna Karenina (one of my favorite books). It was such a short novel, I'm not sure it all worked.
Centered around the very unlikable Anna, The Boy is just one of the many awful mistakes Anna makes in her life. Anna felt as if she had sacrificed her prime years for her now ex-husband and her young daughter, Eva, so...more
Centered around the very unlikable Anna, The Boy is just one of the many awful mistakes Anna makes in her life. Anna felt as if she had sacrificed her prime years for her now ex-husband and her young daughter, Eva, so...more
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This is one of those books that are hard to discuss without sounding ridiculous as they transcend so much their ostensible subject (Anna drunken former journalist and risk taker with rich British ex from hell and young daughter Eva to whom she devotes her life after running away from the cheating ex and she is now trying to raise in the wilderness of New Mexico with gambler housekeeper Esperanza of many problems, falls at 42 for the gorgeous but troubled - Ivy league drop-out - 21 year old son o...more
While not a great read to me, this story was compelling. Main character is a 40 yr old single mom who deeply loves her young daughter, but as a former wild-child she has destructive periods that compromise her relationships and responsibilities as a parent. "The boy" happens to be the 21 yr old son of her next door neighbor with whom she has become sexually obsessed. I was intrigued to see how this mother could and would make choices that had the potential to destroy what could have been a norma...more
Mar 23, 2013
Sanny
added it
I got no idea how to rate this book and thus I’ll leave it without a rating for now.
Equally hard is it to review this one. This isn’t a book you will love but one that will make you think. You can’t just write a review gushing endlessly, instead you’ve got a story filled with honesty, although it’s the kind of honesty that not everyone wants to hear.
This isn’t a pretty story - there’ll be no rainbows and you might want to consider that before you pick it up. Instead you’ll get a story about a wo...more
Equally hard is it to review this one. This isn’t a book you will love but one that will make you think. You can’t just write a review gushing endlessly, instead you’ve got a story filled with honesty, although it’s the kind of honesty that not everyone wants to hear.
This isn’t a pretty story - there’ll be no rainbows and you might want to consider that before you pick it up. Instead you’ll get a story about a wo...more
This, and other reviews can be found on Just a Lil Lost
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ (3.5/5 stars)
Anna is raising her precocious 8 year old daughter on her own, living a carefree life when it suddenly gets turned upside down. While at a neighbour’s party, she becomes bewitched with the neighbour’s 20-something year old son. Full of snark and sarcasm, he intimidates her and arouses her at the same time. Caught between her duty as a mother and her want to reclaim her youth, Anna finds herself in an obsessive lo...more
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ (3.5/5 stars)
Anna is raising her precocious 8 year old daughter on her own, living a carefree life when it suddenly gets turned upside down. While at a neighbour’s party, she becomes bewitched with the neighbour’s 20-something year old son. Full of snark and sarcasm, he intimidates her and arouses her at the same time. Caught between her duty as a mother and her want to reclaim her youth, Anna finds herself in an obsessive lo...more
Ugh.
"Provocative, headlong, and utterly compelling, THE BOY is the story of a woman on the edge, torn between love and compulsion, desire and duty." It is exactly not this. It is the opposite. So boring, and all the sexy parts are just skipped over.
Also, the lady who reads out the audiobook was not the best. She gets a 2/5. Her male voices are horrible, and she lacked so much emotion in all of the reading.
Seriously. Do not waste your time.
"Provocative, headlong, and utterly compelling, THE BOY is the story of a woman on the edge, torn between love and compulsion, desire and duty." It is exactly not this. It is the opposite. So boring, and all the sexy parts are just skipped over.
Also, the lady who reads out the audiobook was not the best. She gets a 2/5. Her male voices are horrible, and she lacked so much emotion in all of the reading.
Seriously. Do not waste your time.
I despised the main character, and her "wit". The authors need to repeat herself after every statement was maddening! Example--> "We do not wait for them, the woman said. You don't count to ten? Absolutely not. What do you do? We wait. You wait for them? Exactly. For the children? For the children. You, the grown-ups, wait for the children. That's correct. You should stop smoking dope. I don't smoke dope. You're smoking too much dope."
A single mother in her forties, Anna finds herself drawn to her neighbor’s son, a young man some twenty years her junior. Against her better judgment, she succumbs to the inexorable pull of an affair with him.
In the hands of a lesser writer, The Boy could have been nothing more than a titillating affair. Instead there are no titillating details à la Fifty Shades of Grey, just lots of descriptive prose that make us feel the longing that Anna feels: “Tight in her skin, hot in her head, she resolv...more
In the hands of a lesser writer, The Boy could have been nothing more than a titillating affair. Instead there are no titillating details à la Fifty Shades of Grey, just lots of descriptive prose that make us feel the longing that Anna feels: “Tight in her skin, hot in her head, she resolv...more
We first step into Anna's world during her initial infatuation with a boy 20 years her junior. As the story unfolds we are allowed glimpses into her self-destructive personality and how it affects her relationships, especially with her 8 year old daughter Eva. Lara Santoro's writing is beautiful, succinct, and unrelenting. "The Boy" is the kind of book that continues to haunt you well past the final chapter.
"The Boy" went straight to my core. More than reading, I felt this intriguing story, main-lined it, experienced its sexuality and humanness at the center of my being. Fully engaged from page one, I couldn't put it down. I left choked up and breathless.
Exquisite sentences, rhythmic dialogue, taut structure and pacing. In Ms Santoro's deft hands, 192 pages becomes mammoth work. Unforgettable. I highly recommend this book!
This book left me with a bad feeling which, I suppose is something. The main character is not likable. She is focused on her own needs to the exclusion of everyone else's. Her relationship with her daughter was also disturbing but consistent with her character. I felt like the last quarter of the book was rather forced and contrived. Overall it was just okay, a bit disappointing.
I was honored to have been able to read Lara's new book in galleys. I finished it in a single sitting. It made me cringe and ache and laugh. The gorgeous descriptions. The often-hilarious dialogue. The brutal honesty. My only complaint is that I wished it were twice as long. That and perhaps too I wanted more details about the boy himself. But all in all, a fantastic read. Bravo!
If I could give 31/2 stars, I would have. I really liked this book but felt like I couldn't rate it higher because there wasn't really much to it. The actual story was deeply honest, provocative and moving. But it read like a fast, light read. I'm conflicted about the presentation of such heavy subject matter in such a superficial way, but I think I kind of like it.
This was ok, I guess. Some characters were interesting, like Esperanza and Richard, but the main character was very one-dimensional, her motives didn't seem really clear to me, there was no depth...
The boy character was not explored enough to even begin to explain why Anna would fall so hard for him.
All in all, an ok read, but I wouldn't go out of my way recommending this book.
The boy character was not explored enough to even begin to explain why Anna would fall so hard for him.
All in all, an ok read, but I wouldn't go out of my way recommending this book.
Hmm - short, fast read and the writing style is really compelling. I liked the writing quite a lot, but the main character is a drug addict/alcoholic mother who makes horrendously poor choices resulting in nothing good. Not really somebody you can root for because she really sucks...but I give it three stars because the writing was fascinating.
Reading this one was a little strange for me. The setting and subject matter are eerily similar to my own novel, Sabrina's Window, about a boy and a woman, set in Taos, New Mexico. Beyond that, however, the two story lines are very different.
I thoroughly enjoyed Lara Santoro's deeply felt and painfully realistic portrayal of her entire band of characters.
I thoroughly enjoyed Lara Santoro's deeply felt and painfully realistic portrayal of her entire band of characters.
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“.. we live in an age where the volume of information available is so massive, the stream so deafening, that kids today are separated, mentally and emotionally separated, from what went on last month, forget fifty, sixty years ago. Is it a good separation? I don't think so.”
—
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“The realization, early in high school, that a particle behaved differently if observed or left alone.”
—
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