claire_fuller_writer's reviews
1027 reviews

Very immersive; beautiful nature writing in fiction which really took me to the locations, especially the Canadian forest and the island where the grandmother lives, and a great story.

I feel I'm meant to like this more than I did. I didn't really understand how the change happened in both the main characters.

I usually absolutely love Helen Dunmore's books, and in this the prose was beautiful, but the story didn't carry me along. I didn't feel an enormous amount for what happened in the end and I think I was meant to. A Spell of Winter was much better.

An odd cast of characters who just get odder towards the end, so odd in fact I had to deliberately stop worrying that they weren't at all real and just enjoy it. Too many things happen for such a short book and too many (all) of the loose ends get tied up. But, the descriptions of the house (especially Isabel's room packed full of furniture), of Otto eating (stuffing his mouth full of greens), the darkness under the trees and alongside the waterfall, and Otto's stone carving studio (a small city) are all wonderful. Worth reading just for these.

I've also just finished The Green Road by Anne Enright (which has also just been long-listed for the Man Booker), and they both share a similar structure - chapters given over to different narrators. I've given them both 4 stars, but I think I enjoyed this slightly more. More story, more drama than The Green Road, but that's also why this didn't make 5-stars perversely: too much story, too much drama. The other thing about its structure is that everything is reported to us; there is no dialogue, and whilst this works for the main characters, there is a large number of supporting characters (which I sometimes lost track of) and in their short sections it sometimes reads as though they are giving a police report to an officer.
But these are nit-picking things. The characterisation is wonderful. I cared deeply for June, Cissy, and Lydia and what would become of them (too neatly tied up perhaps). I loved the languid pace, the language.
Highly recommended.

Loved this. All the characters were difficult to like - that was good; it made them real people. I liked the round-about way we get to learn about them, especially Dan (there's a whole section on the New York gay scene in the 1980s where Dan - a main character - plays only a bit-part).
I listened to this story rather than read it, and it worked well. The narrator was excellent and her Irish voice especially was stuck in my head for days afterwards.
The content of the ending was perfect (open-ended), but I would have liked one last section from Constance.

I was sure I'd read this in my late teenage Iris Murdoch phase, but now I'm sure I didn't because this story, these people, this book would be utterly unforgettable. It's weird, odd, almost spooky at times (that bead curtain made the hairs on the back of my neck stick up every time it was mentioned), and the narrator Charles Arrowby talks at length about himself and his various romances, often repeating himself, sometimes being thoroughly irritating, but by the end I adored him. Murdoch breaks quite a few writerly rules in The Sea, The Sea - several coincidences happen for example (which is supposedly a golden rule), but it works in the whole crazy story.
And the description of the sea - oh, so wonderful.

Oh, such a wonderful book. Great characters, prose, landscape descriptions, story. I love how it all the family relationships and the history unfolded so slowly. Sweetland, the man was so real to me, and the village, the sea (almost as a character to). It ended perfectly, it couldn't have ended any other way.

The first Haruf novel I've read, and I really liked his style of writing, so I'll definitely be reading some more. It was the story that made me not love it - it just wasn't strong enough for a novel (or a novella as this probably is) - more of a short / long story sort of thing. An old man and an old woman come together to find comfort in each other's company. One of the things that didn't work for me was that nearly the whole town was outraged, their adult children were outraged. Really? Maybe I'm not familiar enough with small-town America. I can understand gossip, but outrage? I'm not sure.

Nope, this one didn't do it for me. It's not going to put me off Murdoch though - definitely going to try some others. Too much exposition, too much geography (I read another review which said 'just give us a map' and I have to agree) and rebarbative was used too many times. (Of course, that isn't reason I didn't get on with the book, but the word did keep sticking out like half a dozen sore thumbs.)