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3.09 AVERAGE
3.09 AVERAGE
I liked it, but certain things left me feeling "meh" at the end. The story she finds out about her ancestor is pretty neat though.
This one was okay. A good summer read, but nothing to write home about.
This book was a good story, but the beginning was slow and it took me awhile to really get into the book. Once you get about halfway then the book picks up speed.
Interesting story, but I felt disconnected from the main character, Lucy. The characters just feel so distant from each other, even Lucy and her boyfriend Yoshi. The only real connection that showed any kind of feeling was between Lucy and her old boyfriend, Keegan. Lucy overall just seems a very selfish character: ruining her brother's news, angry at her mother for moving on 10 years after her father's death, cheating on her boyfriend, bulldozing over everyone else's feelings in her search for 'the truth'.
I was expecting great things from this book after reading The Memory Keeper's Daughter. But it just fell flat and was disappointing.
DNF at page 100. The main character was terrible, the story details were shoddy, and there were just way too many topics going on in this story. Also the main character made several mountains out of tiny molehills. I found a newspaper article in an old cabinet? Must be some big secret! The stained glass has a pattern I've seen before? There has to be some mysterious connection! Maybe the book would get better in time but I don't care to trudge through and find out.
A rather slow-moving book that couldn't seem to make up its mind what genre it was. I read the blurb, and it seemed to be about a family history mystery, and I enjoy reading such books, but the theme wasn't handled very well. Lucy Jarrett leaves her boyfriend in earthquake-ridden Japan and goes home to the Lake of Dreams in New York to visit her family. She discovers some old papers that suggest that she had some relations she had not known about, and sets out to discover more about them, and they seem to be connected with some stained-glass windows in an abandoned chapel.
So far, so good, except that the story moves painfully slowly, and we are not told much about the family history that he did know, so the startling revelations are less than astartling, and at times in seems to drop into stream-of-consciousness stuff like [a:Virginia Woolf|6765|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1419596619p2/6765.jpg] or [a:James Joyce|5144|James Joyce|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1418595211p2/5144.jpg], with the same dream told three times over, and thoughts repeated again and again, so that in just about every chapter I wanted to say "Get on with the story, for crying in a bucket." Other authors seem to handle the stream-of-consciousness stuff quite well, but in this book it just gets boring,
Much of the earlier part is told in the form of letters of a mother written to her young daughter, whom she has had to leave in the care of relatives. The letters seem not to have been sent, and in any case, the daughter would have been too young to read them. They were also highly unconvincing. I can't imagine a mother writing to her pre-teen daughter in 1912 or 1913 about viruses and human interfaces.
This edition didn't have a cover illustration on Good Reads. That's OK, because the generic cover expresses what I felt about the book.
So far, so good, except that the story moves painfully slowly, and we are not told much about the family history that he did know, so the startling revelations are less than astartling, and at times in seems to drop into stream-of-consciousness stuff like [a:Virginia Woolf|6765|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1419596619p2/6765.jpg] or [a:James Joyce|5144|James Joyce|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1418595211p2/5144.jpg], with the same dream told three times over, and thoughts repeated again and again, so that in just about every chapter I wanted to say "Get on with the story, for crying in a bucket." Other authors seem to handle the stream-of-consciousness stuff quite well, but in this book it just gets boring,
Much of the earlier part is told in the form of letters of a mother written to her young daughter, whom she has had to leave in the care of relatives. The letters seem not to have been sent, and in any case, the daughter would have been too young to read them. They were also highly unconvincing. I can't imagine a mother writing to her pre-teen daughter in 1912 or 1913 about viruses and human interfaces.
This edition didn't have a cover illustration on Good Reads. That's OK, because the generic cover expresses what I felt about the book.
A lovely written story of the Jarrett family. I enjoyed the story but found I didn't make a meaningful connection with Lucy, the story teller.
I felt that the story was beautifully written, although at times it was a struggle to get through and many of the "coincidences" that occurred were very implausible at times it didn't take much away from the story and the way everything became interconnected and wove together in the end I thought was lovely. Definitely worth a 4 star rating, most of the reviews I've seen I feel are much too harsh but each to their own! I personally thought it was a beautiful story.