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3.48 AVERAGE
3.48 AVERAGE
This is a book with a major case of the blues. Don’t let that stop you from reading it, as it’s beautifully written. It’s the story of Hattie and her children and grandchildren, with each chapter focusing on a different year (from 1925 to 1980) and a different character. Each chapter stands alone as a story, and many of them are very haunting.
Hattie, the title character, is flawed and hurting, and all her children contain some jagged piece of that pain within them. Some of it comes from the racism in the society around them, some of it from the dislocation of leaving the south and moving north, and some of it is an echo of trauma that their elders experienced before they were born. They all enact it in different ways, and the author lets us into their deepest selves.
This is not a book that resolves anything, or that offers a cheerful ending. What we do experience is a deepening picture of Hattie herself, a woman who has held a lot of lives in her hands.
Hattie, the title character, is flawed and hurting, and all her children contain some jagged piece of that pain within them. Some of it comes from the racism in the society around them, some of it from the dislocation of leaving the south and moving north, and some of it is an echo of trauma that their elders experienced before they were born. They all enact it in different ways, and the author lets us into their deepest selves.
This is not a book that resolves anything, or that offers a cheerful ending. What we do experience is a deepening picture of Hattie herself, a woman who has held a lot of lives in her hands.
This novel is really a series of vignettes about a family. It is heartbreakingly sad but fascinating. It is different type of novel-it doesn't have a central plot. It travels through snippets of Hattie's children's lives.
Very incomplete book; so I was left feeling and connected to the characters and this was a book all about characters.
Outstanding! Reminiscent of Toni Morrison--not as poetic, perhaps, but more accessibly coherent. I love that this is organized around the lives of Hattie's children. Their various lives are individually fascinating, but collectively they are every American family.
I'm finding it difficult to know exactly how I feel about this book. Most of it is well-written, but I personally just could not engage with it. Perhaps that is a reflection on me rather than the book itself.
This is not so much a novel as a series of short stories, the central character of each being a different member of Hattie Shepherd's family. Hattie herself married beneath her, to a serial womaniser, who nevertheless managed to find time to get Hattie pregnant a dozen times. With her no-good husband barely bringing enough money, and after losing her first children to pneumonia, Hattie's spirit and love are exhausted by the very act of keeping them alive and fed. The rest of the book then demonstrates, through the stories of her children's lives, how Hattie's attitude affected her children's lives.
It's all very worthy, an I feel that I am supposed to adore this book, but I have to confess, after the first couple of chapters I was feeling slightly that I'd got the point, and didn't need another 8 chapters on how terrible and shockingly depressing life can be. The structure of the book also meant that I never really felt fully engaged with the characters. Hattie is the only constant, the others come and go and are, as a result, developed in only one-dimension.
This is not so much a novel as a series of short stories, the central character of each being a different member of Hattie Shepherd's family. Hattie herself married beneath her, to a serial womaniser, who nevertheless managed to find time to get Hattie pregnant a dozen times. With her no-good husband barely bringing enough money, and after losing her first children to pneumonia, Hattie's spirit and love are exhausted by the very act of keeping them alive and fed. The rest of the book then demonstrates, through the stories of her children's lives, how Hattie's attitude affected her children's lives.
It's all very worthy, an I feel that I am supposed to adore this book, but I have to confess, after the first couple of chapters I was feeling slightly that I'd got the point, and didn't need another 8 chapters on how terrible and shockingly depressing life can be. The structure of the book also meant that I never really felt fully engaged with the characters. Hattie is the only constant, the others come and go and are, as a result, developed in only one-dimension.
Solid writing. Lines that made me pause. But it felt like a collection of short stories not seamlessly tied together. Left wanting more.
This is a special book. There is so much to love about it, but it is filled with pain and despair and really hard life experiences. Told in vignettes, the stories of each one of Hattie's children at different stages of their lives serve to describe history, family, class, infidelity, war, and many other facets of life. Hattie appealed to me from the beginning when she naively but determinedly tried to save the lives of her dying babies. She was just a child herself at 17 when that happened. It set the course for the way she would mother the others -- getting too close or too much in love with your kids hurts when they leave you. Plus - she had a husband who was a fun dad but not much of a breadwinner, so how was she supposed to do it all? Some reviewers are pretty hard on Hattie. I have empathy for her and really do believe she did the best she could.
It was certainly well written, but it was one of those books where its hard to like anyone. Feel bad for them, yes. Empathize with what they struggle with, certainly. But actually like? Not so much.
As others have said, the book ends rather abruptly and none of Hattie's children's stories were as fully developed as I would have liked. That said, I enjoyed the book. Hattie's love for her children wasn't the cuddly kind. She felt that she had to prepare them for hard lives, but I think she was afraid to love them like she did her twins who died. She knew she couldn't stand that kind of loss again. When her grandchild comes to live with her, she has a second change at love and parenting.