Reviews

All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy

nightowl22's review against another edition

challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

bloodyfool0's review against another edition

3.0

I wanted to give this book a 4* rating at least.

The book starts very promisingly, but then it drags along until the final third.

The prose is not captivating enough like similar authors in this genre, so it becomes somewhat tedious. Without introducing spoilers, it is the "letters" that make this book really interesting.

Will try to provide a more in-depth review a bit later.

natalie1412's review against another edition

slow-paced

5.0

paree's review against another edition

It was a bit too slow for me. This was my attempt at trying something new, and it did not work

kdhanda's review against another edition

3.0

Beautifully written novel about a woman trapped in her marriage in 1930s India. She leaves her marriage and her son to join two fellow artists in Bali. Myshkin, her son, feels abandoned and struggles with this abandonment his whole life. We only find out about his mothers viewpoint when he gets a bundle of her letters sent to a neighbor friend. The writing was evocative but the framing of the plot felt stilted and I could not get into the characters.

gfaller's review against another edition

adventurous challenging emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

lost_in_a_leabhar's review

emotional medium-paced

4.0

_carpelibrum's review against another edition

emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

black_girl_reading's review

3.0

All the Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy never landed for me. About a man reflecting on the ways his life was shaped by his abandonment by his mother at the age of nine, and the unresolved mystery of what happened to her in the years that followed, this book kept on circling the heart of the story. I like stories of maternal abandonment. I like end of life retrospectives. I like stories that unfold, in part, in letters. I like stories that take me to momentous points in history in places I don’t know the context of in those times (in this case Dutch occupied Bali during WWII). I like how a character study can show how one’s spirit is changed by trauma - in this case how a child as freewheeling as his mother can become stuck in place and mood by losing her. But, I was never swept off my feet by this book. I found the narrator to be kind of flat and without relationships of substance, his later years seeming to be only about work, and so sparse in detail. His mother also, had so much story missing, just so many holes that were never filled - and so many strange choices that didn’t make sense to me (like the reason she left her son behind on the day she left - this seemed such an immensely solvable problem. Many other characters seemed only half sketched, but not in the way that war leaves stories incomplete, rather in a way that felt that the author wasn’t sure what to leave out and what to put in in various backstories and accounts. This oddness was further highlighted by the huge chunks of the mother’s story via letter that didn’t start until later in the book, when before, her life had been narrated by the son’s understanding of her childhood and marriage. Maybe an early diary would have made the perspectives shift less jarring? My final complaint was that the audiobook had only one narrator, a deep voiced man, who read in a fake falsetto for the extensive stretches of letters, hours of them, written in the voice of the narrator’s mother, who was alleged to have a remarkably beautiful voice. It was odd not to use a second narrator. The mother’s story was the richer of two IMO, and it alone would have been a 5 star read for me, instead of 3 in this form.

tiffany6454's review

adventurous emotional reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5