This is a fun, lively work of historical fiction, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It follows the adventures of Sira Quiroga, who in the 1930s is a young,This is a fun, lively work of historical fiction, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It follows the adventures of Sira Quiroga, who in the 1930s is a young, immature Spanish seamstress from a working-class background. She makes some poor life decisions which leave her alone in Morocco, indebted and unable to leave the country, and through a combination of dangerous adventures and hard work, manages to grow up and open a high-class dressmaking business. Which comes in handy for the Allies in World War II, when she is recruited as a spy.
I am typically less critical of books I read in Spanish, since the language requires much more concentration from me than English; this book I enjoyed almost entirely for its fun and sometimes exciting plot, rather than for any exceptional character development or insight into human psychology. But it is a lively and enjoyable plot, and I was quickly immersed in Sira’s struggles. The book provides a satisfying balance between lighter and darker elements: unlike in a lot of historical fiction, which focuses on the wealthy and privileged, the obstacles Sira faces are major and the stakes often high, but at the same time she builds a support network that keeps her story from ever becoming too dark. Similarly, most of the book takes place against a backdrop of war, but Sira waits out the Spanish Civil War in Morocco and spends WWII in Spain, so never encounters war firsthand. It’s a balance, in other words, that allows the story to be gripping without being brutal, and fun without being frivolous.
It’s also a good choice for readers who like to learn about a historical place and time through fiction: even while Sira has her own personal struggles, the book is engaged with its historical milieu, and real historical figures play major secondary roles. It does tend to assume (at least in the Spanish edition) some knowledge of the Spanish Civil War, prompting me to do a little of my own research. And I certainly learned from it; I had little knowledge about the bond between Franco and Nazi Germany, for instance, nor how close Spain was to entering the war on the Axis side. The author’s background is as a professor, and she does an excellent job of combining rigorous research with great storytelling.
Overall, this isn’t a life-changing book for me and it’s one I’ll remember more for its enjoyable plot than other literary accomplishments, though in terms of writing style and especially doing the research it is a cut above the general run of historical fiction. I enjoyed and would recommend it....more
Wow, this is an excellent book. Unusual and brutally sad, but excellent.
You’ve probably already read the description of this book: it’s about aWow, this is an excellent book. Unusual and brutally sad, but excellent.
You’ve probably already read the description of this book: it’s about a character living her life over and over again, vaguely aware of what’s happened before and able to make changes and correct her mistakes. Ursula is born to an English family in 1910, and goes on to lead a series of lives, intersecting like puzzle pieces. This is anything but a straightforward narrative, sometimes jumping backward and forward in time, sometimes repeating the same scenario in several variations, sometimes splicing two or even three scenes together. But if you’re ready to pay attention and go along for the ride, if you like puzzles and complex structures and piecing things together as you read, it’s enormous fun.
Well, I say that, but at the same time it’s a tragic, sometimes harrowing book. Ursula dies any number of painful and detailed deaths: sickness, murder, suicide, the Blitz.... I wasn’t expecting how disquieting it would be to read all the stories leading up to these deaths. And yet, I wanted to read on, to see what other possibilities life had in store for the characters. It’s a vivid cast, sometimes changing (in some lives Ursula marries or has a child, in others she doesn’t), but more often staying the same (Ursula’s parents, her sister and three brothers, her eccentric aunt are all recurring characters), and I found their development deeper for the fact that they were living different lives. Perhaps the author had to know her characters even better than usual to imagine how they would have changed had their lives turned out differently.
On a technical level, I’m impressed with Atkinson's writing. She has a gift for detail, the lines of dialogue that encapsulate a personality, or the vibrant or visceral descriptions that bring a place to life. The story moves fairly quickly, without much time for lingering over the scenery, but I still had a strong sense of the places Ursula inhabits, inextricable from the emotions associated with them--that’s strong writing. Atkinson has a distinctive style, with some quirks a lesser writer wouldn’t be able to pull off (run-on sentences, for instance), but her writing is assured enough that they read as choices rather than mistakes.
The choices I question are in the development of the premise. It begins well enough, but the way Atkinson deals with the multiple lives is a bit inconsistent. Sometimes Ursula remembers enough to avoid death or misfortune, but then she dies three times in almost exactly the same way, for no reason I could discern. For much of the book she’s troubled by déjà vu, and seems to be the only one reliving her life, but especially toward the end, others start making different choices too, even before Ursula is born. And then, in what seems a last-ditch attempt to add some greater relevance to the story, Atkinson spends all of about 10 pages on the Ursula-kills-Hitler subplot introduced in the first chapter, without doing anything with it. An author toying with the idea of changing history, but shying away from imagining how history might actually have changed, is my biggest pet peeve in time travel books.
And I’m not sure this book needed any greater relevance. It’s an excellent piece of historical fiction, bringing to life the time and place in vivid detail. It has just the right mix of familiar-seeming characters and locations with a dizzying array of fresh stories and realistic depth. It’s one of those books that looks at what women’s lives are really like without being heavy-handed about it, so that I suspect many readers miss how feminist it is; Ursula’s older sister, her aunt, and her female friends and colleagues all play key and largely positive roles in her life, and she pursues a career despite knocking up against the glass ceiling. It is a thinking kind of book, a portrayal of life where nothing is inevitable and two equally plausible choices can lead to wildly different results.
So, would I recommend this? Yes, if you’re open to non-linear storylines and willing to put in the effort. It’s the kind of book that rewards reading and re-reading. But keep something lighter on hand at the same time. You may need it....more
Sigh. I read the first chapter of this book and it made me reflect on our community of reviewers, both online and professional, and not in a good way.Sigh. I read the first chapter of this book and it made me reflect on our community of reviewers, both online and professional, and not in a good way. Not only does this book seem to be universally lauded as "beautifully written," even by people who disliked it, but it was even long-listed for the Booker prize. So of course I was expecting a, well, beautifully written literary novel.
Let's take a look at this so-called beautiful writing, shall we? Examples all come from the first chapter (17 pages):
“And there was something else in the envelope. Turning it over, a thin wooden stick, about five inches long, fell out onto my desk.”
“Entering Tanah Rata, the sight of the former Royal Army Hospital standing on a steep rise filled me with a sense of familiar disquiet.”
“Walking over to the mound of leaves, I grabbed a few handfuls and scattered them randomly over the lawn. Brushing off the bits of leaves sticking to my hands, I stepped away from the grass.”
The scenery described may be beautiful, but this writing is not. The writing is inelegant when it isn't downright clunky. A Booker contender? Seriously?
Meanwhile the flat first-person voice completely failed to inspire my interest in the narrator, even though it's a character type I might be expected to enjoy. This is a good example of why authors shouldn't use the first person unless it's really necessary; when the voice isn't strong, when no discernible personality seeps through, it only distances readers from the character. Character interactions also seem clunky, with everybody wanting to know about the narrator's Tragic Past.
I am trying to stick to a policy of quitting any book that inspires lengthy criticism after the first chapter, so this one is headed back to the library. And, fellow reviewers: please don't be afraid to criticize an author's writing style just because everyone else is calling it beautiful. Just because people say it doesn't mean it's true....more
This is one of those books that's almost impossible to talk about without revealing plot elements, and that's most enjoyable to discover as you go.This is one of those books that's almost impossible to talk about without revealing plot elements, and that's most enjoyable to discover as you go. So, if you think you'd like a young-adult novel starring two women--one a pilot, one an intelligence officer--in WWII, and you don't like spoilers, you should probably avoid all reviews (mine included) and just read it.
Now for the review.
Overall, Code Name Verity is an enjoyable book. The story is gripping, with tension and danger throughout--naturally enough, as one of the protagonists spends the book as a Nazi prisoner. The characters are fairly vivid, and I enjoyed reading about a pair of tough, capable women. I was unaware of the role of women pilots in England's Air Transport Auxiliary during the war, and so especially enjoyed reading about Maddie's advancement as a pilot. The author, a pilot herself, does a great job of communicating her love of flight, and her clear knowledge of planes adds verisimilitude. Wartime England and occupied France are both brought to life, and the writing style is adequate without drawing attention to itself.
Two problems then. First, I liked the idea of the main characters' friendship better than its depiction; they seem to leap right from getting acquainted to undying sisterhood, with readers missing a step somewhere along the way.
Second, there are the myriad problems with the epistolary format. The first 2/3 or so of the book is supposed to be written by Julie, the captured intelligence officer, as a "confession" for her captors. Unreliable narrators are fun and this keeps the reader guessing. But for the premise to work, we must believe that 1) the Nazi captain is such a lover of literature that he doesn't mind that his prisoner's "confession" is actually a novel-length narrative weaving together her own day-to-day life as a prisoner and her best friend's wartime experiences, and 2) despite that, he's too dense to realize that she's not telling the truth--even though the third sentence of her account is "I have always been good at pretending," even though she paints herself as a gutsy con artist throughout and admits to making up details. That's a lot to swallow. I'd figured out much of what Julie was hiding halfway through her narrative--for instance, that she liked the translator much more than she let on--and had a hard time believing someone whose job is getting the truth out of prisoners wouldn't have figured her out too. Wein just does not handle well the tension between an author's need to give hints to the reader of what's really going on, and Julie's need to write a completely convincing document. Interspersing Julie's story with other documents could have arrived at the same result without making both her and her captors look stupid.
Maddie narrates the last third, and the premise here doesn't make much sense either--she writes most of it in hiding in France, where if found her writing would endanger not only her but the family sheltering her. The two characters' voices sound alike, and the voice doesn't quite fit either of them: too refined for Maddie the working-class mechanic, not refined enough for the ultra-privileged Julie, and too young for either. (Their voice reminded me of Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle, and she isn't much like either of them.) In both cases their styles are also too novelistic to be plausible--complete with dialogue, scenes, etc.
There are some plot details, too, that don't add up. (view spoiler)[Like, Julie's getting captured because she looked the wrong way when trying to cross a street. It must have been a two-way street, or it wouldn't matter what side of the road cars use in that country, but then, why would she only look one way if she was crossing a two-way street? And then, why are the Allies willing to put so many resources into bombing an empty building? It seemed like the author felt Julie needed to be vindicated somehow, and using her intelligence to destroy the hotel did that. Except, the Nazis can always just requisition another building. So what was the big deal? (hide spoiler)] But, in the end, Code Name Verity is a competent book that I would have enjoyed much more at age 14 than as an adult. It's very young-adult, in everything from pacing to plot elements to the characters' voices, and I wonder why Wein chose that route, given that the protagonists are women in their 20s whose stories would suit an adult book just fine (despite that, they're rather jarringly referred to as "girls" throughout, perhaps to make them seem closer to the intended audience's age).
So, do I recommend the book? Maybe. Despite the glowing reviews, I found nothing mindblowing about it. But if you typically enjoy YA and are willing to engage in a lot of suspension of disbelief around the premise, chances are you'll love it....more
This is one of those books that engaged me, but for which I can come up with little praise in retrospect. At first I wanted to round up to 3 stars,This is one of those books that engaged me, but for which I can come up with little praise in retrospect. At first I wanted to round up to 3 stars, reflecting my level of enjoyment, but quality-wise it’s more of a 1.5. So we'll call it a 2.
When the Elephants Dance purports to be a tale of civilians living through the Japanese occupation (and American recapture) of the Philippines during World War II, narrated alternatively by a nationalist guerrilla leader, a teenage girl, and her preteen brother. Fortunately--since that storyline is weak--more than half the book is spent in folk tales, as five other characters narrate stories from their pasts, replete with magical realism.
The war story starts out engaging, but quickly becomes melodramatic, full of one-dimensional characters and clichéd emotion. It’s relatively fast-paced, with endless captures, escapes and rescues, but clunky and awkwardly written, a problem only aggravated by poor use of the first-person present tense. Ultimately, I just didn’t buy the author’s handling of war or trauma, which is full of cheap drama and devoid of genuine, thoughtful character-defining moments. The more extreme the characters’ situations, the less interesting and less believable they become. And they're almost always extreme.
But Holthe’s writing about life in the embedded tales--with themes like sibling relations, political awakening and falling in love--is better. The tales are genuinely intriguing, their prose is passable, and they include some of the character development missing from the frame story. Anna’s realization that her first priority in marriage is a mother-in-law who will prefer her to her sister, for instance, is one of those moments that stands out because it’s unusual and tells us a lot about her character.
But then, the folk tales are awkwardly dropped into the frame story, with little introduction and no follow-up. (Much the way that whole dialogues in Tagalog are dumped into the text, only for every word to be immediately translated into English.) Nor are there meaningful parallels in theme or escalation of tension; the frame story and the characters’ understanding of each other within it are so unaffected by the tales that they might as well be a separate book entirely. For that matter, the same storytellers who are reasonably interesting in the tales are as flat as everyone else in the main story, and even afterwards I had a hard time remembering which cardboard character went with which folk tale (particularly with the three interchangeable middle-aged men; the elderly man and the one woman are a bit more distinct). Unsurprisingly, all eight voices sound identical.
Throughout, the sense of place is superficial--the Philippines is a vaguely tropical but ill-defined locale. Thus, while disappointed, I was not surprised to discover from other reviews that Holthe (a Filipino-American) made a number of mistakes in the culture and geography.
What’s evident even to a reader with no knowledge of the country is the lack of thought put into detail. The preteen boy narrator tells us, for instance, that he used to walk 20 km each way to work: that’s a 25-mile round trip, or roughly 6 hours’ daily commute if he walks briskly and doesn’t take breaks. He’s hardly the only potential triathlete in the story: people regularly traverse impressive distances in scant time, over uneven terrain, while injured, without food and often carrying heavy loads. That’s when they’re not busy explaining to each other the meanings of words in their own language. In my favorite moment, one Filipina says to another, "Karangalan [your last name] means 'honor' in Tagalog, but you know that, right?" Presumably they're speaking Tagalog, so she's actually saying "Karangalan means 'karangalan.'" Um, right.
Overall, then, while Holthe shows some potential in the folk tales, this clunky, awkward book left a poor impression. It did entertain, but it’s not one I'd recommend....more
Small Island is a good, solid book in nearly every way, although for me it didn’t have that something extra that would take it up to 5 stars.
The frameSmall Island is a good, solid book in nearly every way, although for me it didn’t have that something extra that would take it up to 5 stars.
The frame story is set in London, 1948: a black Jamaican couple, Hortense and Gilbert, move to England and rent a room from a white woman, Queenie, whose husband Bernard mysteriously failed to return from WWII. Most of the book traces each of the four main characters’ backstories, up until the last hundred pages set in 1948.
Small Island is quite an interesting piece of historical fiction, examining the era when England started to change from mostly homogenous to multicultural, and all the friction that went with that. The harsh realities of immigrant life and the ugliness of racism take center stage, particularly the latter, as American racism (segregation and hostility) is contrasted with British racism (less institutionalized but no less hostile) and Jamaican racism (subtler, based on the shade of one’s skin, but pernicious nonetheless). The book is thoughtful in its treatment of these themes: everyone involved has virtues and flaws, and there’s a powerful bit at the end that shows how harmful racism can be to white people too.
The characters themselves are fairly well-developed and believable. This is one of the few books where I don’t think the author made a terrible mistake in having all four characters each narrate their own story in the first person. While you can tell all four voices come from the same author, there are enough differences in their vocabularies and styles that this comes off well, and each personality comes through in the narration. Levy also does an excellent job of showing those personalities rather than simply describing them: an example other authors could learn from. We don't have to be told that Hortense is prim, Queenie well-meaning but patronizing, or Bernard rigid. But while the characters are distinct (from one another and from other fictional characters; I appreciate the avoidance of the generically-inoffensive type), at times they felt a bit consciously constructed, their personalities not quite fitting together. Gilbert, for instance, says several times that he wants to study law, but he seems to have that desire merely so that obstacles can be thrown in his way; he doesn’t ever show actual interest in law, or enjoy reading, or display any other characteristics that would make sense of that ambition. But still, the characters are interesting people whose backstories I wanted to read, and their relationships are complex. Both marriages are made from convenience, and it was especially interesting to see how everyone dealt with that.
Levy also does an excellent job evoking the settings--the Blitz has been done a lot in literature, for example, but this depiction stands out. The dialogue is good, and the use of Jamaican patois lends color without being impenetrable. The writing is smooth and the ending appropriately bittersweet. So while this isn’t up to 5 stars with me, it certainly gets a solid 4....more
What the blurb led me to expect: A book about Burma in the late 19th century, starring a boy/young man named Rajkumar.
What the book actually is: AnWhat the blurb led me to expect: A book about Burma in the late 19th century, starring a boy/young man named Rajkumar.
What the book actually is: An epic family saga beginning in 1885 and ending in 1996, set in Burma/Myanmar, India, and Malaysia, starring a whole bunch of people.
Fortunately, I like epic family sagas starring a whole bunch of people. I was pleased to find that, far from just being Rajkumar’s love interest as the blurb would indicate, Dolly is a protagonist in her own right (arguably more central than Rajkumar). And Ghosh manages to make subsequent generations of characters equally interesting.
However, this isn’t without a caveat--111 years is a long time to cover in a single volume, and so a lot of time is skipped over. Less than 100 pages into the book, Rajkumar and Dolly are already in their 30s, and that’s only the first of several significant time-skips. Beyond that, I’ll confess to some disappointment with the periods Ghosh chooses to focus on. One-third of this book is devoted to World War II, which so. many. books. have been written about already. The years of post-independence turmoil in Burma, which I have never read about, are dismissed in barely a page. Granted, the book covers facets of WWII that I was unfamiliar with (in particular, the dilemmas faced by the Indian soldiers), and the war was crucial to the end of British colonization in Asia, and these sections are well-written.... but still.
At any rate, now that I’m done quibbling with authorial decisions, on to the good stuff. Because pretty much everything in this book is good stuff. The characters are interesting, diverse and believeable. The plot entertains--yes, there’s a lot of history in it, but for those who want to learn from historical fiction, it’s an excellent balance. The cultural and historical detail are fascinating--from the late-19th-century teak camps to the early-20th-century rubber plantations to the tense streets of 1990’s Yangon. The descriptions are very visual and there’s a real sense of place. The scope of this book is amazing, and for all that, we get to know a lot of places very well. The one place the book goes off the rails a bit is with the romances, which tend toward the melodramatic without giving a clear picture of why the characters are so drawn to each other--but there’s enough (well-done) tragedy that the book avoids becoming saccharine. And thus far I haven’t mentioned the themes, but the discussions of the effects of colonialism, in particular, are certainly worth a read.
So, the verdict: The Glass Palace is a very good book. But it should have been a trilogy....more
I didn't connect with or just didn't get this book. There was a lot of unfamiliar name-dropping and I felt like allusions or something were just goingI didn't connect with or just didn't get this book. There was a lot of unfamiliar name-dropping and I felt like allusions or something were just going right over my head. It may be great, but evidently not for me....more
I was so impressed by this book that it's taken me awhile to work out what to say.... primarily, what fascinated me was the grace and effortlessnessI was so impressed by this book that it's taken me awhile to work out what to say.... primarily, what fascinated me was the grace and effortlessness with which it moves from one setting to another: a large chunk is set in Kashmir, covering much of the last half of the 20th century; another large chunk in Europe (primarily France) during the Second World War; the last chunk in Los Angeles in the 1990s. Each of these settings and historical periods is richly detailed; a lesser author would have taken an entire book (at least!) to evoke just one of them. Rushdie, however, discusses the history of Alsace and the history of the India-Pakistan conflict with equal facility, making for a truly rewarding read. And the prose is beautiful.
Of course, this isn't just a book about setting: we follow the lives of four main characters, as well as a host of minor characters who add quite a bit of flavor to the stories. Unlike some other reviewers, I think Rushdie's female characters are depicted quite well; neither of the female main characters is Everywoman, but as a woman I found them realistic and compelling even when I couldn't relate to their decisions.
This is one of those books that begins near the end, then works its way backward in time before coming back around; I often find this irritating since I already know what's going to happen, but in Shalimar the Clown it works extremely well: even knowing (part of) the end, I was dying to know what happened in the middle.
Finally, as far as the politics of the whole thing... I was surprised when I came to this site after finishing the book and saw how many people view it as a book about terrorism. Hardly. Yes, the history of Kashmir in the last half-century includes terrorists, and so they appear; yes, the book comments on the causes of terrorism. But there is a lot more to it than that; with slight alterations, the book could have been written with only passing references to terrorism and kept the story largely the same, which should tell you it's not the big focus. If it might bother you, you should know that the Indian government is portrayed in an unfavorable light, while Rushdie's views on the US government come across as somewhat ambivalent. And that the atrocity count in some places is high, although this doesn't make the book depressing all the way through--some of my favorite scenes were the comic ones depicting pre-war village life in Kashmir.
Some have read this entire book as political commentary (with particular characters representing "east" and "west", "Hindu" and "Muslim", etc.), and since Rushdie is a literary author, I don't doubt he intended that. But for me it was mostly just a great story, and I thoroughly enjoyed it as such. Happy reading! ...more
The Harmony Silk Factory is a narrative dealing primarily with Malaysia prior to the Second World War (also briefly discussing the situation duringThe Harmony Silk Factory is a narrative dealing primarily with Malaysia prior to the Second World War (also briefly discussing the situation during and after the war), as narrated by three distinct characters. The first section, narrated by Jasper, the son of the infamous Johnny Lim (possibly the protagonist, although we never hear from him directly), is interesting but not riveting. Jasper is the classic unreliable narrator, hating his father so much that we know he can't be objective. Second comes Snow, Jasper's mother and Johnny's wife, and here the narrative is bogged down in the minutiae of a jungle excursion. I was reminded forcefully of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, both by the setting and the painfully slow pacing, although I'm not convinced that Tash Aw is quite so profound. Finally comes Peter, Johnny's English friend; his section is the dullest, alternating between a retelling from his perspective of the same excursion and more about garden planning than I ever wanted to know--interspersed with a few crucial insights into previous events.
This isn't a bad story, although I found most of the characters unlikeable--Jasper's primary characteristics are arrogance and hatred of his father; Snow's, passivity; and Peter's, pretentiousness and self-absorption, while Johnny is such an enigma that we barely get to know him at all. However, the pacing quite slow, and gets slower as it progresses. The author's use of multiple narrators who tell very different truths is a too-infrequently-used technique and he pulls it off well, which I suppose accounts for all the positive professional reviews. I give it three stars because neither the story nor the characters ever appealed to me; this was the only book available to me on a long flight, and otherwise I probably never would have finished it.
I would recommend this book to anyone who has a special interest in Malaysia or who enjoys long, leisurely-paced character studies, but the rest would be better off giving this one a pass. ...more
I've read more than my share of WW2 books, but The Book Thief was probably the best I've ever read. It surprised me to find out that it is classifiedI've read more than my share of WW2 books, but The Book Thief was probably the best I've ever read. It surprised me to find out that it is classified as young adult; while the protagonist is young, the level of writing and in particular the depth and moral ambiguity of the characters make it a worthy read for those who are well past adolescence. The plot is not always fast-paced, as we see Liesel grow up in a poor section of a German town, but it is enjoyable--Zusak's portrayal of children and young teenagers is the best I've seen in a long time, avoiding the common pitfalls of turning them into miniature adults on the one hand, or shallow caricatures of childhood on the other. In fact, by the end, the characters young and old will probably seem more real than a lot of the real people you know!
This is an amazing book, and one that steps outside of the box in many ways, even in addition to the choice of Death as a narrator--a choice that seems quite appropriate to the story, as Death has plenty of unique insights to offer without breaking the flow of the story. At times Zusak seems a bit heavy-handed with his themes (the humanity of the Jews in particular; do the few people out there who dispute this actually read mainstream WW2 novels?), but in my case this did nothing to detract from the overall experience. This is one of those few books that really will make you laugh and cry, and deals with a difficult time period without beating you down. Quite an achievement.
I picked up this book because 1) it's historical fiction, which I like, set in rural western Australia, which isn't a setting I see very much of andI picked up this book because 1) it's historical fiction, which I like, set in rural western Australia, which isn't a setting I see very much of and 2) the narrator has albinism, which is just cool. While it's a decent book, it didn't quite come together for me. Maybe I'm just not the right reader for this one; it will probably appeal more to fans of contemporary lit than historical fiction. And while there's plenty of Literature-with-a-capital-L that I think is fantastic, books like this seem to be hit or miss.
As others have related, this book revolves around Gin, a pianist trapped in an emotionally unfulfilling marriage with the farmer Toad; World War II is on and due to Australia's labor shortage, Italian POW's are sent out to work on the farms. The result is a complicated love quadrilateral (pentagon?) where the only thing that's really clear is that no one's emotional needs are being met.
The characters are complex and often opaque, and Gin has a strong voice. Goldbloom gives her believable flaws while creating a sympathetic character; Gin has had a hard life and so it's easy to feel for her, even while recognizing that she's making bad decisions and being a poor mother. I especially like the way readers can recognize what's really going on even where Gin is deluding herself. And her past, as it's slowly revealed, is well-handled. Several of the other characters remain enigmas to the end, leaving the reader with something to think about; it's nice that the author doesn't insist on one way of viewing any of the characters.
The plot did drag a bit for me; it has a leisurely pace until close to the end, where it picks up quite a bit, but sags in the middle. The end is appropriately tragic, but leaves at least a little bit of hope, and the story certainly didn't go where I expected, which is refreshing. The writing style is good if a bit overwritten in places. There's a strong sense of place, with great descriptions of the landscape and lifestyle of the rural farmers, although at times the author seems most interested in the more disgusting details of everyday life. While I like fiction to be somewhat "gritty," grounded in sensory detail and unafraid of ugliness, this book wallows in it a bit much, with its descriptions of the children sweeping cow urine into the gutter with their bare feet, or Toad picking diseased skin off his fungus-infested feet and eating it. Beside those distasteful details, Goldbloom's opting for a fade-to-black for the childbirth scene and the did-they-or-didn't-they love scene is incongruous.
What bothered me the most about this book, though, was the lack of clarity; sometimes it's hard to tell what's going on. (This style of writing might appeal more to those who like stream-of-consciousness works, as Gin's narration is anything but straightforward.) Gin jumps back and forth between the past and present tense, and a few short scenes, bizarrely, jump out of Gin's first-person perspective altogether. (It's startling in a book that uses the imprisonment motif so heavily for the author to choose not to confine herself completely to the narrator's point-of-view, especially since the deviations didn't appear strictly necessary.) And finally, there are a few scenes that just don't make much sense. For instance, early on it's established that the farm's kitchen is not well-stocked; they're on rations and Toad is stingy with the money (Gin's dresses are sewn from old gray sacks). Additionally, the Australians are suspicious of Italian food. Then a truckload of soldiers shows up unexpectedly and one of the Italians cooks them a huge meal of spaghetti, garlic bread, and so on. Wait a minute: where did all those ingredients come from?
In some ways, this book clearly succeeds. It does a good job with the characters and handles the theme of confinement very well. But I didn't enjoy it the way I expected to and am not sure I would recommend it to others. ...more
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