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A review by lorrainelowereads
'til the Well Runs Dry by Lauren Francis-Sharma
4.0
4.5 STARS
I love when a book really surprises you and is so much more than you expected. With ‘Til The Well Runs Dry I expected (from the cover and the blurb) a gentle, easy going family drama. And that’s more or less how it started out, quirky but lovely. But then the shit starts to hit the fan; children going missing, child rape (not described in detail), a marriage over before it’s even begun, police corruption, MURDER!!, prostitution, black magic, a powerful uncle with political ambition, slave labour, and on and on.
The main characters, Marcia Garcia and Farouk Karam, are perfectly imperfect. The reader needs to work hard to like them as they try to raise four daughters on the island of Trinidad in 1950s and 60s. They do so many things wrong and fail at so much but Marcia in particular is (almost always) doing her best within the confines of her own life.
There are some book club questions at the back of this edition of the book and there is one in particular that caught my eye, about the expectation on female writers to make their female characters ‘likeable’. I’d like to think that this expectation is lessening with time as I think it’s more important to understand a character than to like them. This was certainly true of Marcia Garcia.
Highly recommended!
I love when a book really surprises you and is so much more than you expected. With ‘Til The Well Runs Dry I expected (from the cover and the blurb) a gentle, easy going family drama. And that’s more or less how it started out, quirky but lovely. But then the shit starts to hit the fan; children going missing, child rape (not described in detail), a marriage over before it’s even begun, police corruption, MURDER!!, prostitution, black magic, a powerful uncle with political ambition, slave labour, and on and on.
The main characters, Marcia Garcia and Farouk Karam, are perfectly imperfect. The reader needs to work hard to like them as they try to raise four daughters on the island of Trinidad in 1950s and 60s. They do so many things wrong and fail at so much but Marcia in particular is (almost always) doing her best within the confines of her own life.
There are some book club questions at the back of this edition of the book and there is one in particular that caught my eye, about the expectation on female writers to make their female characters ‘likeable’. I’d like to think that this expectation is lessening with time as I think it’s more important to understand a character than to like them. This was certainly true of Marcia Garcia.
Highly recommended!