Juli's review
Housekeeping: A Novel
by Marilynne Robinson
Juli's review
Housekeeping: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson
Juli's review
rating:
bookshelves:
fiction,
top10
recommended for: patient readers who can appreciates the intricacy of an amazing writer
Written twenty years prior to her Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead, Housekeeping outperforms any debut I've managed to come across. Composed at the age of thirty-seven, it feels Robinson has been storing up this novel her whole life, only to wait until the characters fully reveal themselves and the story unweaves completely before contemplating its production.
Housekeeping tells the story of two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, thrown a mileu of guardians over a period of a few years. First, their mother, who keeps a less than tidy urban residence in Seattle. She then drives them to their grandmother's in the tiny village of Fingerbone, where she proceeds to drive her car into the same lake where her father drowned years prior. The girls' housekeepers then switch hands again once their grandmother passes away, to a pair of whispering fidgety great aunts. Finally, Sylvie, their estranged aunt, becomes their fourth and final housekeeper for the duration of the novel. What happens in the ...more
Housekeeping tells the story of two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, thrown a mileu of guardians over a period of a few years. First, their mother, who keeps a less than tidy urban residence in Seattle. She then drives them to their grandmother's in the tiny village of Fingerbone, where she proceeds to drive her car into the same lake where her father drowned years prior. The girls' housekeepers then switch hands again once their grandmother passes away, to a pair of whispering fidgety great aunts. Finally, Sylvie, their estranged aunt, becomes their fourth and final housekeeper for the duration of the novel. What happens in the ...more
