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4.02 AVERAGE
4.02 AVERAGE
I loved this wonderful meandering story that kept getting a little lost in the quirky characters that it is made up with. I stretched out the reading to stay within the world created for as long as possible! And who says capitalisation within a sentence is not correct grammar - so worked to give us a wonderful sense of Ruthie Swain, too clever by half for the people of Faha!
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I feel like I need someone to give me a full literary analysis on this book to fully understand it. I liked this book a lot but a lot of it just felt so slow to get through. But at the end of the day I liked it. It’s got some good quotes, especially the end of this book felt very well rounded and sappy. The authors note helped me understand a bit more about this book. I know it’s brimming with metaphors and literary devices but theres so much to understand in this book I couldn’t quite catch it all. I had seen this book at the goodwill bins and thought it looked interesting. I’m glad I read it, the story feels very real in a way, not at all like fiction. It was definitely interesting and written interestingly and I enjoyed my fair share of quotes while reading something that felt a bit more outside my usual even if it was a bit harder to understand at times.
dark
emotional
funny
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Boring - sometimes amusing, but not enough
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Loveable characters:
Yes
challenging
funny
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I have mixed feelings about this book. The first part was a real slog. I enjoyed the last 75 or so pages. There are tons of book titles complete with accession numbers which the narrator, a teenaged girl who is an invalid, lists in detail as she tells her family history. The book is sad bordering on depressing. Frankly, nothing much happens in it. Maybe it was not written for a person of my tastes.
Nineteen year old Ruthie lives in the rainy Irish countryside, has an undefined health issue that keeps her sometimes bedridden and sometimes taken into the hospital, loves to read and write ("Smart Girl Syndrome", she says), and is trying to keep her late father, a poet, close to her in spirit by reading the thousands of books he left behind.
What it made me think about: life, death, sadness and how people have so much of it sometimes but they keep carrying on; books and how reading saves us, whether it's an act of will or rebellion or joy or....(fill in the blank); families and their complex histories and how their stories filter down to us and how they affect us; the nature of "place" and how that also affects us - in Ruthie's case, Ireland and all it means to her and her family.
How it made me feel: It's incredibly funny and incredibly sad, and full of great story telling in the way only a book written by an Irish writer can be. I would like to have it read out loud to me in an Irish pub on a rainy day.
May best be understood through some quotes:
"The world is more outlandish than some people's imaginations."
"Robert Louis Stevenson said that to forget oneself is to be happy, that his imagination sailed him away into adventures..."
"Irish people will read anything as long as it's about them." (Hee hee!)
"Once the Councillor started getting asked his opinion, fatally he became convinced of the existence of his own intelligence. You ask him a question you get a paragraph." (I know so, so many people like this.)
On driving: "I can't imagine how I'd have the confidence to just trust that it would be all right, that the unexpected wouldn't happen, because in fact that's all that does happen."
Talking about Dickens, Faulkner and Marquez: "Virgil liked the epic quality, the messiness of generations, the multitude of figures drifting in and out and the certainty that time was not a straight line."
On the challenge of being a writer when you've steeped yourself in great literature: "Read Dickens. Read Dostoevsky. Read Thomas Hardy. Read any page in any short story by Chekhov, and any reasonable person would go 'ah lads,' put down their pencil and walk away."
On families: "The strangeness of each of us is somehow accommodated so that there can be such a thing as family and we can all live for some time at least in the same house. Normal is what you know."
Much love to Ruthie and her family.
P.S. My aunt gave me this book!
What it made me think about: life, death, sadness and how people have so much of it sometimes but they keep carrying on; books and how reading saves us, whether it's an act of will or rebellion or joy or....(fill in the blank); families and their complex histories and how their stories filter down to us and how they affect us; the nature of "place" and how that also affects us - in Ruthie's case, Ireland and all it means to her and her family.
How it made me feel: It's incredibly funny and incredibly sad, and full of great story telling in the way only a book written by an Irish writer can be. I would like to have it read out loud to me in an Irish pub on a rainy day.
May best be understood through some quotes:
"The world is more outlandish than some people's imaginations."
"Robert Louis Stevenson said that to forget oneself is to be happy, that his imagination sailed him away into adventures..."
"Irish people will read anything as long as it's about them." (Hee hee!)
"Once the Councillor started getting asked his opinion, fatally he became convinced of the existence of his own intelligence. You ask him a question you get a paragraph." (I know so, so many people like this.)
On driving: "I can't imagine how I'd have the confidence to just trust that it would be all right, that the unexpected wouldn't happen, because in fact that's all that does happen."
Talking about Dickens, Faulkner and Marquez: "Virgil liked the epic quality, the messiness of generations, the multitude of figures drifting in and out and the certainty that time was not a straight line."
On the challenge of being a writer when you've steeped yourself in great literature: "Read Dickens. Read Dostoevsky. Read Thomas Hardy. Read any page in any short story by Chekhov, and any reasonable person would go 'ah lads,' put down their pencil and walk away."
On families: "The strangeness of each of us is somehow accommodated so that there can be such a thing as family and we can all live for some time at least in the same house. Normal is what you know."
Much love to Ruthie and her family.
P.S. My aunt gave me this book!