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barbarianlibarian's review against another edition
2.0
meh meh meh
i can't remember where i read about this book being good, but they were lying. it was totally boring. the blub makes it sound super interesting, but it's totally not.
i can't remember where i read about this book being good, but they were lying. it was totally boring. the blub makes it sound super interesting, but it's totally not.
melvankomen's review against another edition
4.0
I found this a sweet and surprisingly complicated story. The 83-year-old narrator provided a unique point-of-view and I enjoyed how the hype of a much anticipated children's book intersected with the lives of the characters. I found a few spots where the pace lagged or the voice felt inconsistent but overall it was a satisfying read.
misajane79's review against another edition
4.0
A story of a dying, small town, a missing girl, and a wondeful woman who's nearing the end of her life. I really loved the characters, but I was also somewhat annoyed by some of the obvious and heavyhanded references to Willa Cather, Harry Potter, and A Series of Unfortunate Events. It's an odd little book, but still a wonderful read.
tshrope's review against another edition
3.0
I found this book on a summer reading list off the NPR site and I thought it would be a quirky fun read. It has all of the makings of a quirky novel; eighty-something Essie narrates this story and writes obits for the newspaper, her grandson, Doc, who runs the paper but really longs to be a magician, and a mystery about whether a little girl actually ever existed outside of her mother’s imagination who now claims her daughter has been abducted,--but all of these things do not a quirky fun novel make. In fact I would say it is more of a serious novel occasionally laced with bits of amusement. In addition to the mystery there is a subplot about the newest Miranda and Desiree book (think A Series of Unfortunate Events) being leaked. But overriding both plot and character is theme. This is a theme driven novel and the theme is fractured families.
Each of the main characters come from , or is a part of a fractured family. Ivy, Essie’s granddaughter abandons her 7-year old daughter, Tiff, to go to Paris with her mentor and lover. Her brother, Doc is left to raise Tiff until 6 years later Ivy unexpectedly comes back to Nebraska to become Tiff’s Mom again. Daisy, raised on nearby Crippled Eighty Farm claims her 11-year old daughter, Lenore, has been abducted by an itinerate aerial photographer, but no one seems to be able to remember Daisy ever having a daughter. (I love the names Schaffert uses for the moms: Ivy, the vine that continues to grow and overtake everything in its path and Daisy, the simple, common flower. ) Muscatine, the author of the Miranda and Desiree books has a stepdaughter whom he loves like his own (even after he has divorced her mother) and wants only her approval and love, but instead is completely disdained by her. Schaffert wants us to think about parenting and families and what makes a family, and the old adage of “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” He also explores other themes such as aging, death, and the media.
Schaffert is a good writer and effortlessly weaves his many themes and plot lines together effortlessly. And while it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be I did enjoy it; whether I’ll remember much about it a year from now though is doubtful.
Each of the main characters come from , or is a part of a fractured family. Ivy, Essie’s granddaughter abandons her 7-year old daughter, Tiff, to go to Paris with her mentor and lover. Her brother, Doc is left to raise Tiff until 6 years later Ivy unexpectedly comes back to Nebraska to become Tiff’s Mom again. Daisy, raised on nearby Crippled Eighty Farm claims her 11-year old daughter, Lenore, has been abducted by an itinerate aerial photographer, but no one seems to be able to remember Daisy ever having a daughter. (I love the names Schaffert uses for the moms: Ivy, the vine that continues to grow and overtake everything in its path and Daisy, the simple, common flower. ) Muscatine, the author of the Miranda and Desiree books has a stepdaughter whom he loves like his own (even after he has divorced her mother) and wants only her approval and love, but instead is completely disdained by her. Schaffert wants us to think about parenting and families and what makes a family, and the old adage of “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” He also explores other themes such as aging, death, and the media.
Schaffert is a good writer and effortlessly weaves his many themes and plot lines together effortlessly. And while it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be I did enjoy it; whether I’ll remember much about it a year from now though is doubtful.
ancientdebra's review against another edition
4.0
Every time someone caught me reading this book, I would read them a paragraph because it was so great. I savored it and every page.
sharonfalduto's review against another edition
A gothic novel (I guess; one of these days I'll find out what that means), about a little town in the Midwest that is withering on the vine, and also there's a girl who is either missing or might never have existed, and furthermore there's an addictive book series that is being printed in the little towns printing press, so there's all kinds of plots going on in this slim tome. The author had a nice eye for detail.
And now a minor rant on the subject of books within books--I've always thought this was sort of an easy way out for authors; "hey, I've got this great idea for a book, but I don't want to write it, I'll just write that Kilgore Trout wrote a book with such-and-such a plot!"
And now a minor rant on the subject of books within books--I've always thought this was sort of an easy way out for authors; "hey, I've got this great idea for a book, but I don't want to write it, I'll just write that Kilgore Trout wrote a book with such-and-such a plot!"
jennyshank's review against another edition
5.0
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20110527-book-review-the-coffins-of-little-hope-by-timothy-schaffert.ece
The Coffins of Little Hope
by Timothy Schaffert
(Unbridled Books, $24.95)
Timothy Schaffert's fourth novel, The Coffins of Little Hope, is a the droll, gleefully morbid, and smart, droll and gleefully morbid story of an unsolved small-town mystery.
delivered by an The irresistible narrator is Essie Myles, a gimlet-eyed 83-year-old obituary writer who is the for the Nebraska town's newspaper, The County Paragraph. Essie is the who Essie counts herself among the Nebraska town's “death merchants” (along with the undertaker, organist, florist, and cemetery caretaker), and she is also the beloved matriarch of an unconventional family. Her Essie's husband died young, as did her son and his wife; her grandson, Doc, took over as publisher of the Nebraska town’s newspaper, The County Paragraph, from his father, and he also took over raising his sister Ivy's daughter, Tiff, when Ivy followed a lover to Paris. and stayed there for several years.
Essie, Tiff and Doc find themselves at the center of a series of strange eventsin their town. One day, when the town's misfit, Daisy, reports that her lover Elvis, a door-to-door aerial photography salesman, and her daughter, a child no one knew existed, have vanished. The missing girl, like the missing sweetheart in Poe's “The Raven,” is named Lenore. No evidence that any child ever lived in Daisy's farmhouse is found, and Daisy is considered just crazy enough to have made the whole thing up.
But Daisy maintains she's telling the truth, the story captures the country's morbid fascination with missing children, and the County Paragraph's subscription rolls swell as people all over the world clamor to learn more.
Essie develops a following for her obituaries, and one of her fans is the author of an enormously popular 11-book series, that, like Harry Potter, has so imbued the popular culture that even those who resisted reading these books are aware of their contents: “Many otherwise stable men and women well into their forties still feel struck with the heebie-jeebies when they recall the gothic predicaments of the two sisters, Miranda and Desiree, the innocent wards of Rothgutt's Asylum for Misguided Girls.” Essie carries on a secret correspondence with the author, who wrote her a fan letter, even while the County Paragraph's printer turns out top-secret copies of the 11th book in the series. In order to avoid leaks, the book's publisher hired small-town presses to covertly print the novel.
A cult of Lenore enthusiasts, whom Tiff calls “the Lenorians,” emerges and some townspeople make money off “the sad pilgrims who skulked in and out.” This would seem a humorous exaggeration, except that it's not much of a stretcher. In Boulder, Colo., for a time, stores catering to the tourist trade sold purses printed with JonBenet Ramsey's likeness. Indeed, The Coffins of Little Hope seems to have been inspired by JonBenet Ramsey-type incidents, the Harry Potter craze crossed with Lemony Snicket-like gothic subject matter, reality TV, and tabloid journalism, but Schaffert miraculously transforms this heap of contemporary junk culture into durable art.
The Coffins of Little Hope is packed with insights about aging, death, the disappearance of newspapers (“How does a town even know what it is, or who's in it, if there's no newspaper?” Essie says), and contemporary life. Willa Cather enthusiasts who have made the trek to Red Cloud will enjoy Schaffert's bits about the famous dead Nebraska writer Myrna Kingley Fitch, whose foundation has been “saving [her] dying rural town by killing it, inch by inch, and casting it in amber.” The Coffins of Little Hope is warm and wise, demonstrating that Schaffert is a writer who can laugh at and love his characters in equal measure.
Jenny Shank's first novel, “The Ringer,” was published this spring. She is the Books & Writers Editor of NewWest.Net.
[email protected]
“The Coffins of Little Hope,” by Timothy Schaffert is a smart, droll and entertaining small-town mystery. The author takes a mishmash of cultural references — from JonBenet Ramsey to Willa Cather to Harry Potter and even the death of newspapers — and turns it into something solid.
The Coffins of Little Hope
by Timothy Schaffert
(Unbridled Books, $24.95)
Timothy Schaffert's fourth novel, The Coffins of Little Hope, is a the droll, gleefully morbid, and smart, droll and gleefully morbid story of an unsolved small-town mystery.
delivered by an The irresistible narrator is Essie Myles, a gimlet-eyed 83-year-old obituary writer who is the for the Nebraska town's newspaper, The County Paragraph. Essie is the who Essie counts herself among the Nebraska town's “death merchants” (along with the undertaker, organist, florist, and cemetery caretaker), and she is also the beloved matriarch of an unconventional family. Her Essie's husband died young, as did her son and his wife; her grandson, Doc, took over as publisher of the Nebraska town’s newspaper, The County Paragraph, from his father, and he also took over raising his sister Ivy's daughter, Tiff, when Ivy followed a lover to Paris. and stayed there for several years.
Essie, Tiff and Doc find themselves at the center of a series of strange eventsin their town. One day, when the town's misfit, Daisy, reports that her lover Elvis, a door-to-door aerial photography salesman, and her daughter, a child no one knew existed, have vanished. The missing girl, like the missing sweetheart in Poe's “The Raven,” is named Lenore. No evidence that any child ever lived in Daisy's farmhouse is found, and Daisy is considered just crazy enough to have made the whole thing up.
But Daisy maintains she's telling the truth, the story captures the country's morbid fascination with missing children, and the County Paragraph's subscription rolls swell as people all over the world clamor to learn more.
Essie develops a following for her obituaries, and one of her fans is the author of an enormously popular 11-book series, that, like Harry Potter, has so imbued the popular culture that even those who resisted reading these books are aware of their contents: “Many otherwise stable men and women well into their forties still feel struck with the heebie-jeebies when they recall the gothic predicaments of the two sisters, Miranda and Desiree, the innocent wards of Rothgutt's Asylum for Misguided Girls.” Essie carries on a secret correspondence with the author, who wrote her a fan letter, even while the County Paragraph's printer turns out top-secret copies of the 11th book in the series. In order to avoid leaks, the book's publisher hired small-town presses to covertly print the novel.
A cult of Lenore enthusiasts, whom Tiff calls “the Lenorians,” emerges and some townspeople make money off “the sad pilgrims who skulked in and out.” This would seem a humorous exaggeration, except that it's not much of a stretcher. In Boulder, Colo., for a time, stores catering to the tourist trade sold purses printed with JonBenet Ramsey's likeness. Indeed, The Coffins of Little Hope seems to have been inspired by JonBenet Ramsey-type incidents, the Harry Potter craze crossed with Lemony Snicket-like gothic subject matter, reality TV, and tabloid journalism, but Schaffert miraculously transforms this heap of contemporary junk culture into durable art.
The Coffins of Little Hope is packed with insights about aging, death, the disappearance of newspapers (“How does a town even know what it is, or who's in it, if there's no newspaper?” Essie says), and contemporary life. Willa Cather enthusiasts who have made the trek to Red Cloud will enjoy Schaffert's bits about the famous dead Nebraska writer Myrna Kingley Fitch, whose foundation has been “saving [her] dying rural town by killing it, inch by inch, and casting it in amber.” The Coffins of Little Hope is warm and wise, demonstrating that Schaffert is a writer who can laugh at and love his characters in equal measure.
Jenny Shank's first novel, “The Ringer,” was published this spring. She is the Books & Writers Editor of NewWest.Net.
[email protected]
“The Coffins of Little Hope,” by Timothy Schaffert is a smart, droll and entertaining small-town mystery. The author takes a mishmash of cultural references — from JonBenet Ramsey to Willa Cather to Harry Potter and even the death of newspapers — and turns it into something solid.
asealey925's review against another edition
3.0
Originally published at www.apatchworkofbooks.com
When a young girl goes missing in Little Hope, a tiny town populated mainly with the elderly, the entire town is effected in various ways. Most notably, Essie, the town's obituary writer. We follow Essie as she, and the rest of the town, become caught up in the kidnapping and the life of the little girl's mother. Questions begin popping up as to whether the kidnapping was completely made up...the ultimate hoax and Essie tries to figure out what it would mean to the town--and to herself-- if the girl was simply a figment of imagination.
A totally quirky read! I kept saying to myself how strange the story was and how I didn't have any idea what was going on, but it didn't matter. I wanted to keep reading and reading and I was determined to figure out what was truly happening in Little Hope.
Essie was a fantastic character, one that was strong-minded and quick to state her opinion, yet incredibly witty. I loved the inclusion of the young adult series of novels that keep everyone in the town reading (though they too were pretty strange) and wanting more books, and the concept of small town life was spot-on.
I would have to think about who to hand this book to. Definitely not someone looking for a clear-cut story, but rather a reader that likes to think and linger in the pages of their books. It's a great book for discussion, as my book club found out...we chatted for quite awhile about how quirky it was.
When a young girl goes missing in Little Hope, a tiny town populated mainly with the elderly, the entire town is effected in various ways. Most notably, Essie, the town's obituary writer. We follow Essie as she, and the rest of the town, become caught up in the kidnapping and the life of the little girl's mother. Questions begin popping up as to whether the kidnapping was completely made up...the ultimate hoax and Essie tries to figure out what it would mean to the town--and to herself-- if the girl was simply a figment of imagination.
A totally quirky read! I kept saying to myself how strange the story was and how I didn't have any idea what was going on, but it didn't matter. I wanted to keep reading and reading and I was determined to figure out what was truly happening in Little Hope.
Essie was a fantastic character, one that was strong-minded and quick to state her opinion, yet incredibly witty. I loved the inclusion of the young adult series of novels that keep everyone in the town reading (though they too were pretty strange) and wanting more books, and the concept of small town life was spot-on.
I would have to think about who to hand this book to. Definitely not someone looking for a clear-cut story, but rather a reader that likes to think and linger in the pages of their books. It's a great book for discussion, as my book club found out...we chatted for quite awhile about how quirky it was.
bookbrig's review against another edition
1.0
I found this boring. But that could be because it has lots of tangents, and I have zero patience for tangential writing. Also, I think a lot of the characters are irritating. That said, I had to read this for a work thing, and lots of other people love it, so take my review with a grain of salt.