claire_fuller_writer's reviews
1030 reviews

Love, love, loved this book. Beautiful writing, sad story, great characters. Oh, just go and read it. The only thing I found odd was that Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift which I read last year, was so very similar, so similar that I'm surprised no one has pointed this out. Same time period, and similar things happen, although Swift's is set in England and this is Ireland. Made me feel a bit weird about Mothering Sunday.

Review and rating to follow. I'll be interviewing Juliet for Bookanista.

I kept telling myself all the way through, 'remember this is a genre novel', but in the end it didn't help enough. I quite enjoyed the sleuthing, the sleazy bars, the drinking and the alcoholic bulldog. But I didn't like the sexism. C.W, hired to find a drunken author, becomes obsessed with a girl who disappears, following her trail through the worst kind of depravity and feeling bad for her and her mother. And yet he feels nothing for the 'sad young whore in a trailer-house complex out on the Nevada desert' who he 'humped'. All the women want to sleep with C.W. and all of them seem to want to get thinner, dress in sexier clothes and put on make up just for the men in the book.
(The book does have a brilliant title though.)
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3.5 stars. Other reviews complain about this being a slow book, and it is but I liked that - Donoghue allows the readers to feel the tiring shifts of the nurse, Lib who has been hired to watch over an Irish child whose parents claim she is a miracle - alive and not eating. I found the story compelling and read it quickly, wanting to know the outcome of young Anna. I really enjoyed the main story, it was Lib's loves that I had a few issues with: both in the main timeline of the story, where she falls in love with a journalist, and in her back story with her previous husband, neither of which I found convincing. I also felt that there were many conversations that Lib had with members of Anna's family and others that were cut short for the sake of the plot, and therefore a bit frustrating.
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Beautiful prose, but too fragmentary to really be a novel, or even short stories. The mood is very evocative, dream-like, obscure, and sometimes in the slightly longer sections this really worked for me, but then something very short would cut in, and my mind would want to try to sort it out, where it fitted in the narrative. Perhaps I should have been able to just let go and have it wash over me like poetry, but that didn't work either.
Interesting, but not perfect.
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I hadn't heard of George Saunders (here in the UK we don't seem to be big short story readers or promoters) until his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo came out a week or two ago. That's getting a lot of attention, but I decided to start with this collection of ten stories. Some of them I absolutely loved: Victory Lap (the first in the book), Escape from Spiderhead (my favourite for its inventiveness), The Semplica Girl Diaries (funny and awful at the same time), and Tenth of December (moving, thoughtful). These four were the longest in the book, and a couple of the shorter ones really didn't work for me: Sticks, and My Chivalric Fiasco.

But on the basis that four of the stories in this book were near perfect, I'd say read it. Saunders is inventive, funny, sad, and interesting.

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I would have given five stars if this had been mostly about the photographs (which are superb), and I would have given five stars if this had been mostly about the case studies - both these elements were wonderful. I was also really interested in how Berger saw Sassall's relationship with his patients, how he felt he needed to imagine what it was like to be them, to almost become them, and also the essay on anguish and how it takes us back to childhood.

I understand that all books are a product of the time they're written in, but the first problem for me was how male-centric Berger makes this book, and somehow I wouldn't have expected it of him. When Sassall's patients are discussed as a group they are the foresters - literally those who work with the trees in that part of the world, and male. (The female patients are sometimes mentioned in passing: unmarried girls who come to him when pregnant, women giving birth.) And when Berger compares doctoring with other professions, an artist for example, his examples are male. I simply tired of this after a while.

And secondly I had a bit of an issue with how Berger describes Sassall as so unique and important in the way he goes about his work (perhaps true), but in comparison to an 'average' patient, who 'expects to maintain what he has - job, family home.' I don't believe there was or is an average patient, and I don't believe that there weren't numerous 'foresters' who didn't aspire for something more.

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3.5 stars. There was something about this book that made me want to find out what happened, and I read it very quickly. The style of writing makes it an easy read, and it is a very interesting story - inspired by a real life crime of the murder of two children in New York in 1965. Because their mother, Ruth Malone, doesn't behave in the way the police and most of society expect her to, as a grieving mother, she is held responsible for the crime.

I thought at first that the novel must follow the true crime pretty closely because there are long periods of time where nothing happens in the investigation, but after the book's end Flint states that it is a work of fiction, inspired by a true story. Perhaps this is my biggest issue with it, and maybe it's because it couldn't quite work out what it was: true crime, thriller, police procedural... Not that every book has to fit into an exact slot, I like the fact that Flint has resisted that, but it is written as if we are following the crime, the police investigation, and yet we learn no new revelations as the book progresses, it isn't terribly pacey, we aren't taken down any blind alleys. Perhaps Flint was thinking it was a character study of the reporter and the mother. I'm not sure.

Spoiler

My other plot issue is that Ruth Malone is charged with one count of manslaughter, and another of murder. And yet that isn't ever explained. Why the two charges? In court a witness says she sees Malone put the children in a car with an accomplice. The prosecution use this to show Malone's guilt, but I don't see how this could have convicted her of murder in a novel, where the plot needs to tight. (Perhaps this happened in the real case, but then it makes the book's plot flawed.) <\spoiler>

And in a very minor criticism, which didn't stop me from liking the book, but did pull me up a little short there were some copyediting issues. At the end of the novel, in the courtroom the photos of the dead children are taken down, and then a few pages on the policeman Devlin is staring at them. And somewhere else Devlin goes for lunch with the reporter, and we're told that everything was absolutely, exactly the same as the first time they'd had lunch. But Devlin eats a different meal to the first time. Silly things, but they niggled.

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Like Olive Kitteridge, Anything is Possible is a book of linked short stories, but this time based around Lucy Barton (from My Name is Lucy Barton) and the town she grew up in. And it's wonderful. The writing is lucid, the characters real, and the situations they find themselves in, the relationships they have with each other are excruciatingly honest and believable. There's love and hate, pain and redemption. The stories deal a lot with American class: what happens to you as an adult when your childhood is poor, both emotionally and financially. Despite the many saddnesses the stories cover, I still felt uplifted, and the message Strout seems to want to deliver is a positive one; that yes, despite an awful upbringing we all have the capacity for change.

Thanks to Penguin for the proof copy.

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This is the story of a marriage and infidelities of the body and the mind. Gus (Augusta) is married to Owen, and they are both recovering from an affair that Gus has had several years previously. They move to the country, where their idyll is darkened when a woman comes to rent the house next door.

I loved everything about it. Black took me through all of the emotions of betrayal, hard-won forgiveness, love, commitment; all of that, as well as juggling a very believable sub-plot about a father with alzheimer's and a back story about grief. That makes it sound like a sad book. Oh, it is a sad book, and written with a wonderfully sad tone, but it's also a book about struggling to make art (both written and painted) which I really identified with.

And then it has this spectacularly well-handled ending that made me cry.

Basically this was everything I want to read in a book. Couldn't recommend it more.

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