Too busy to post; too busy to do much but read. Here’s the list of recently read that I will (soon, soon, I promise) post details about:
Motherless Brooklyn, Johnathan Lethem
Hunger Games Trilogy, Suzanne Collins
Under this Unbroken Sky, Shandi Mitchell
Where the River Narrows, Aimee Laberge
The Holding, Merilyn Simonds
Filed under Uncategorized
Penelope Lively’s novel Family Album leaves as much mystery about its characters as this portrait. The family of the titular album is comprised of six children and three parents. The “shocking” reveal of the novel is that the au pair (whose name escapes me, such is her impression on this reader) mothers the final family child (Clare) with the patriarch and that the mother, zealously committed tothe importance of family, insists on raising Clare as her own. This reveal is not shocking. Any contemporary reader with a passing experience of family life will be attuned to the levels of secrecy operating in any given family. That the family members never speak about Clare’s parentage (until the last few pages) is also meant to be something of a shock, and again, I found this unsurprising. What family speaks openly about secrets? Is that not the nature of secrets to begin with?
If you are willing to put aside the scant basis for plot and turn only to character, you will be sadly disappointed. The characters each receive small chapters of third person limited narration, with slightly greater attention paid to the mother and the eldest daughter, Gina. Despite this narrative focus, none of the characters feel complex (at all), and so I found myself caring very little (or at all) about how they felt about anything – let alone how they were impacted by the dastardly father and the “deep dark” family secret. Indeed the characters felt as still and fixed as any portrait in an album.
Filed under Book I'll Forget I Read, Fiction
Gil Adamson’s The Outlander focuses on “the widow,” a nineteenth-century woman we quickly learn who has killed her husband and, as the novel opens, is on the run from his two brothers.
The widow herself is unremarkable. The plot, likewise, leaves something to be desired. The widow encounters a series of figures who help/hinder (but mostly help) her escape in the fashion of a children’s book where a lost lamb tries to find its mother and must first meet a duck, horse, pig and cow before at last finding its true mum. So follows the plot of The Outlander. That said, by the time the novel gets to the “cow” in the series of chance encounters, I found myself rooting for the widow’s escape and invested in her finding something of a happy ending. Not overly invested, mind you, but interested, which is more than I expected throughout the first half of the book where (I confess) I only kept reading because I suspected the novel might be of some use to my thesis (it will not be).
Meh.
Filed under Canadian Literature, Fiction, Historical Fiction
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