Weighed down by plaudits and awards, maybe the expectations got the better of me. I certainly enjoyed, but by no means loved this book. Full review is on my site here.
Tag Archives: award winning
Popcultureboy’s #CBR5 Review #58: Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
A return to her roots after The Lacuna, this is an absolutely glorious book about butterflies, climate change, families, farming, science and more besides. It’s epic, it’s riveting, if it didn’t use the word “gotten” so much, it would be 5 stars. Full review is here.
Sophia’s #CBR5 Review #26: The Round House by Louise Erdrich
I remember reading Love Medicine (1993) by Louise Erdrich for an English class in high school. I was probably too young and inexperienced to really appreciate it. I just vaguely remember some domestic violence and being disturbed. So, when I saw that The Round House (2012) was making news and getting good reviews, I was, at first, ambivalent about reading it. Fortunately, I let go of my high school ignorance and gave Erdrich another try.
Joe Coutts is thirteen years old during some of the most formative events of his life. He lives a pretty comfortable life on the Ojibwa Reservation as a much-loved only child of his father, Basil Coutts, an attorney and tribal judge, and his mother, Geraldine Coutts, a tribal clerk. When his mother is brutally attacked and raped, Joe’s stable family is abruptly and unexpectedly torn apart. His mother is suddenly not the same mother he’s grown up with his entire life, and his father is a distracted version of himself. Joe not only feels the loss of his parents, but the burden of responsibility for finding out who did this. To complicate things, Joe, who is still a child, is not privy to all of the details of the investigation. He faces a lot of confusion, fear, and frustration.
Click here for the rest of my review.
The Mama’s #CBR5 Review #19: Empire Falls by Richard Russo
I read a review of this novel that compared Russo’s writing to a slow boil, and that’s exactly what it is. I put this book down several times – it lags in places, and I grew a little bored waiting for something to happen, But after a few days, I’d pick it up again, and literally devour another seventy-five or a hundred pages. It pulls in hundreds of threads, and weaves them together in a way you don’t always see coming. The characters are flawed, exquisite, sad, conflicted, ugly, but always, they are very, very human.
Read more here…
Cannonball Read V 