This is a tough review, and I'm not going to even try to summarize the plot. It is so big and sprawling and spans the Holocaust to the Low Country to the Appalachians to Italy and back again. The story is beautiful and heart-breaking at the same time. Some of the characters are beautifully developed and some seem more like cardboard cut-outs. I love how the ending tied up the loose strings though I think some of it was unfair.
The writing is amazing. The author has a gift for description that made me want to live in Waterford as a young boy and fish and crab and catch shrimp and I definitely wanted to eat everything that Jack cooked. I also am impressed that the author has so much detail to this story, but on the downside, he probably could have left a couple hundred pages out and still told the story - as this was a whopper of a book at over 700 pages.


One reason that I am not rating this book higher is that is has a TON of swearing and rough language and some difficult scenes. I am not usually too worried about the language but this really had an overabundance that would make it hard for me to recommend and it is not always just swearing, just a lot of pretty gross boy language.