claire_fuller_writer's reviews
1027 reviews

Very beautiful book about the relationship between mothers and daughters. Lovely writing. It came very close to getting five stars, but suffered because I read it quite soon after finishing Mothering Sunday, which although a very different book, also talks a lot about what makes writers become writers and I think Graham Swift did it slightly better.

And there were some very moving parts, which I didn't think Elizabeth Strout quite trusted the reader to get. Perhaps I wouldn't have got them all, but I didn't always like her pointing them out to me.
For example, there's a conversation between the narrator and her mother, where the narrator asks her mother if she loves her.
'When your eyes are closed,' she said.
'You love me when my eyes are closed?'
'When your eyes are closed,' she said.

The daughter is happy, but of course she never did get her mother to actually say the words, so it's also terribly sad too. I got that. But in the next paragraph the narrator says '...I feel that people may not understand that my mother could never say the words I love you...'

I just wasn't sure I wanted this pointed out to me. There are a few other instances of this.

But I'm being picky. The book was beautiful, sad and beautiful.

Hmm, nicely written, but it was too long for the story. I think it would have worked best as a novela. Also it felt like Swift was trying to lead us along the path of a twist or a revelation as if was a crime genre novel but there wasn't one. I don't mind that there wasn't one, it's just the expectation that didn't work. I also had issues with the sensitive, thinking, feeling narrator, George, who was a policeman turned private detective. Of course there are sensitive, thinking, feeling private detectives, but I felt Swift was trying too hard with all the cooking stuff to make George that kind of man.

Loved this book. It works best as a collection of short stories linked by a house (and sometimes characters turning up again), rather than a novel, but that made it all the better for me. It was the early ones in the house's history that I enjoyed the most: the tragedy of the architect, Georgiana More's disgrace, and Dulcie, who finally learns to be happy. The history didn't weigh these pieces down - they were about people living out their lives at a certain time. The two book-ends and the story set in 1976 didn't work quite so well for me.

James Lees-Milne worked for the National Trust and during the 1930s and 1040s he visited many country houses whose owners were thinking about handing them on to the trust. The small book is extracts from his diaries organised by house rather than date. Lees-Milne is wonderfully observant, sometimes snide and very funny: "There were Mr Woodhouse, a little, dull old man with a flabby hand, [and] genial Lord Barrington with hairs growing out of his cheeks and ears..." "Luncheon consisted of one egg in a jacketed potato..."
I will definitely be buying and reading the full diaries.

Oh so wonderful, writing, stories, characters, location. Just perfect. Olive Kitteridge is a difficult woman, but still I loved her, kind of became her, even when she was so peripheral in a chapter, and so in the 'story' where her son points out the kind of person he sees her as, I was as shocked as she is that other people see her in this way.
Some of the stories were perhaps slightly weaker than the others - the penultimate one about Rebecca stealing - for instance didn't touch me as deeply as the others.
Definitely a book I'd like to re-read.

Gentle and lovely, but hasn't really stuck with me. One day just after the second world war when everything changed for the English who had once been able to afford cooks and maids. I have no idea how this cover came to be chosen...

I loved the gradual unfolding of the story, the layers that were revealed - who Simone is, what has happened to Chiara's sister and of course Daniele. The descriptions of Rome and the Italian countryside were beautiful. My only problems with it were the very end, where I felt we got a sudden summary of the future, and when what happened to Daniele is revealed to both Chiara and Maria - somehow this didn't have the impact that might have been intended. These things are minor though - it is a very lovely book.

I raced through this, and loved the dynamics between the characters in the lifeboat - their petty squabbles, the women coming to the fore - but then something happened (or rather didn't happen) in the final third of the book, which is mostly set in a courtroom, and is mostly reported rather than showing the action. It rather trailed away, and all the tension that Rogan had built dissipated when we learned nothing new.
Some people have written about how Grace is an unreliable narrator, but it seemed to me that her account of events pretty much tallied with Mrs Grant's and Hannah's. I wondered if Grace was supposed to have

Spoiler

killed Maryanne, who says that she will tell people that Grace's husband bribed her way onto the lifeboat, and that Grace did kill Mr Hardie

but this is dealt with in such a slight way it barely registers.

This is perhaps a 3.5 star-book for me. And I'm not sure I would call it a novel; rather a set of short stories that are linked together by location, and family. There were some chapters that were truly outstanding, five-start stories: the first - Target Practice, Missing Pieces, Talisman. And others that I found awkward and cliched: the last one - Tears of the Gods, Wake, Many Waters.
I liked the spread of time from 1876 to 2143, but because the people were related and there were a lot of them, the author decided (or agreed) to put in a family tree. I had to refer to this a lot and sometimes it of course acted as a spoiler. There's one chapter where it's not clear at first if she will end up with her husband or leave him for another man. When I looked at the family tree to work out how she fitted in with everyone, it was clear that she ends up with the other man because he father's her children.
Patchy, but I'll definitely look out for whatever Sara Taylor writes next.

Wonderful, wonderful, awful characters, in a hotel setting that is dulled by soporific boredom. The writing is slow, it suits the speed of the story, which seems slight on the surface, but is about a life decision Edith Hope, the central character makes by the end of the book. Subtle but oh, so clever.