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3.57 AVERAGE
3.57 AVERAGE
This wild ride of a woman with a scrambled brain, a wacky career doctoring film scripts, and two grown children in terrible trouble reads like a series of Booth cartoon captions, if Booth were a woman who worked in Hollywood. Or it might also be written like a series of disconnected numbered scenes in a Hollywood shooting script. Or, or, or . . . who knows? I don't. It is funny and sad and completely unhinged. I enjoyed it.
funny
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This was novel, what, #6 for 2007? That's quite a record for me, and luckily I've yet to be disappointed. For a work that was decidedly not linear, I never found myself lost. It was like the 500+ sections were puzzle pieces, detailed enough so that you could see the whole picture without having to put those pieces together.
It took me a really long time to read this book, and then today I picked it up and started over from the first page, and finished it a couple hours later, and now cannot understand how I ever had a hard time reading it. Go figure.
So, it’s like this: Mary Robison took a jackhammer to the English language. She cleared it of all the tired and old debris of overused everything in order to throw down asphalt for a new, beautiful, literary road of her own making. Had I ever read anything before this book? I can’t remember. This book made reading new again and has,quite possibly, ruined me for all other works of fiction. Read it. Read it. Read it. And then, read it again.
adventurous
challenging
emotional
funny
fast-paced
Content Warnings
Minor: Animal death, Rape
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I almost stopped reading this because it felt like it wasn’t going anywhere. I kept reading because it made me laugh out loud. I’m glad I persisted because I wound up loving it and wanting to go back and highlight all the clever lines
This is not like reading Alfred Lord Tennyson, but neither is it like inhaling from a bag of glue.