From the Bookshelf of Constant Reader…

An American Marriage

Tayari Jones

Start date: July 15, 2019

Finish date: August 1, 2019

Discussion: Reading List

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Reading List

* The Schedule for July through Dec. 2025
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What Members Thought

Jun 12, 2019 Jane rated it really liked it

Shelves: womans-story, recentfiction, family-story

At first I felt as though the characters' conversations felt stilted, inauthentic. Gradually, I grew to care about and believe their talk. The plot is intense; the sense of longing for home and family is intense. I really loved Celestial (Georgia). She changes and tries to be true to herself and her creativity, as well as her relationships. This is an American story, one in which race changes everything. The sentences and language are explosive rather than elegant and I grew to love that.

Here's ...more

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Jul 22, 2019 Ricki rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This was a quick read. Having just finished another book where the voice changed from chapter to chapter, I appreciated the fact that in this one, although the voice changed there was a continuity of story progression. The other thing that I noticed early on were phrases here and there that I was unfamiliar with as they were not used in my cultural background. This extended the way in which I was able to enter the cultures she was describing. The story was be.ievable although I wasn’t sure about ...more

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Feb 11, 2019 Jade17 rated it liked it

Shelves: female-authors, 2019

I finished An American Marriage in a couple of hours. It was compelling and I liked how it focused more on the crumbling relationship between the couple (Celestial and Roy) instead of the circumstances surrounding his false incarceration.⁣
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‘But home isn't where you land; home is where you launch. You can't pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.’⁣
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The middle part of t ...more

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Aug 01, 2020 J.D. rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Tayari Jones has done it again. Never settling for tropes, she always manages to ensure everyone’s perspective is given fair time and must be considered by the reader. You will naturally want to pick sides but in doing so you are at risk of being convinced otherwise and challenging parts of what you believe to be true or correct.

When a partner goes to jail(especially unjustly), the natural inclination is to sympathize only for them and think of what they’re going through. And yet during this al ...more

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