Catie's review
Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda
Every lovely thing that I have read about Anna Gavalda is true. This book is lovely, heartbreaking, and so very hopeful without resorting to sentiment and a flowery vocabulary; I can't say enough good things about it.
Gavalda's style is at once minimalistic and incredibly colorful and provocative. She plunges her reader into the middle of conversations, then sets the scene as she goes rather than vice versa. Some may find that dissorienting, but I found that it greatly improved my ability to relate to, and see from the characters' points of view. At the end of the novel I didn't feel that I was friends with Philou, Camille, Franck, and Paulette, so much as that I had watched them and loved them their whole lives. They were real, vital, breathing people. For various reasons I connected Camille with Sarah Poley's character, Hanna, in The Secret Life of Words. Though their stories are very different, their pasts are a mystery to us for much of their stories and they both...more
Gavalda's style is at once minimalistic and incredibly colorful and provocative. She plunges her reader into the middle of conversations, then sets the scene as she goes rather than vice versa. Some may find that dissorienting, but I found that it greatly improved my ability to relate to, and see from the characters' points of view. At the end of the novel I didn't feel that I was friends with Philou, Camille, Franck, and Paulette, so much as that I had watched them and loved them their whole lives. They were real, vital, breathing people. For various reasons I connected Camille with Sarah Poley's character, Hanna, in The Secret Life of Words. Though their stories are very different, their pasts are a mystery to us for much of their stories and they both...more
