When it come ups to books my girl is a series monogamist; she reads one book at a clip from start to finish. I on the other manus am a literary polygamist; in any given hebdomad I am in the procedure of reading four or five books.
Last hebdomads it went like this
- The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller
- Mermaid in the Basement by Michele Spike Lee West
- Musicophilia by Joseph Oliveer Sacks
- The Girl Who Walked Home Alone by The Queen City Chandler
- The Art of Big Talk by Debra Fine.
By the end of the hebdomad I had finished The Senator's Wife and Mermaids in the Basement.
Both are fiction. Both are written by well known authors. Both characteristic two coevals of women and their contrasting lives. Both were told from alternating points of view. Both portray the bosom inside information of matrimony and betrayal.
And yet, they could not be more than different!
The Senator's Wife is beautifully written, the linguistic communication rich, the fictional characters complex, the secret plan compelling.
Sue Glenn Miller takes us deep into the private lives of women with this hypnotic portrait of two matrimonies exposed in all their shame and imperfection, and in their obdurate, unyielding love.
This is a book I wanted to love. In the end I couldn't make myself do it. No substance how difficult Iodine tried, I did not love this book.
It was very slow going. OK, I acknowledge that this is fantastic writing; an Byzantine fictional character survey of two morally equivocal characters. The job is that no substance how much Iodine tried, I couldn't like these women or particularly place with either of them or their choices. And they weren't so unusual or interesting that I ended up (even grudgingly) fascinated by them. And worse, the denouement left me cold -- it seemed both contrived and predictable.
And yet the book have stayed with me all week. I've rolled it around in my brain, examined it and analyzed it. My concluding answer? It was ultimately unsatisfying.
Mermaids in the Basement was a speedy read that pulled me in from the first sentence and never allow go. Nothing heavy about this. But the fictional characters are rich and complex and downright intriguing.
Ripe with Southern appeal and sultry atmosphere, West's diverting and amusing up-to-the-minute unravels the tangled gossamer web of an bizarre drawn-out Southern family.
These women are certainly morally ambiguous. But conjecture what? They are likeable and their picks do eccentric sense. I didn't necessarily place (it is difficult to be less of a "southern belle" than I am) but these women are existent fictional characters who grabbed my emotions as well as my brain.
It hasn't really stayed with me in the same manner as The Senator's Wife. I haven't spent any clip analyzing it. And yet it left me feeling warm and satisfied.
