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3.67 AVERAGE
3.67 AVERAGE
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Finally put it down at page 271. I'm not sure what people get out of this book. Tried my hardest to finish it, but just couldn't go any longer. 1st DNF book in two years.
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-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
Sobbed through the last 20 pages and the ending pissed me off - such a beautiful story
I am a child of the suburbs. My husband’s career took us into the inner city and middling-sized towns and small towns and resort towns. Once, I told a teenager at a resort town that it was a beautiful place to grow up. He scowled. I discovered his graduating class was 23 students. Ouch. Another small town had an annual ‘pumpkin roll;’ the road on the hill into downtown was lined with bales of hay, and people rolled their pumpkins down the hill.
So, when the main character in Groundskeeping told about the annual Halloween event of soaking a bale of hay in kerosene, lighting it on fire, and rolling it down the hill into downtown, I perfectly understood his hometown.
“I’ve always had the same predicament. When I’m home, in Kentucky, all I want is to leave. When I’m away, I’m homesick for a place that never was.” These were Owen’s first words to Alma when they met at a party. She tells him she is from “a country that no longer exists,” her Muslin family refugees from Bosnia.
Alma is a visiting writer on fellowship at Ashby College. She went to an ivy league school. Her family is well off. After college, Own had faltered, became addicted to opioids, and recovered, and now is working at the college so he could take one free writing class a semester. Owen is a groundskeeper living with his elderly grandfather, who watches John Wayne movies, and his disabled, disgruntled, Trumpite uncle. His parents are divorced, his mother a evangelical Christian married to a Trump voter and his father caring for a wife dying of cancer. Owen longs to escapee the Bible Belt and everything it stands for.
They could not be more different. They become lovers. But life is not a novel or a movie. Sometimes there is no happily ever after. Not when it’s a choice between love and career.
I wasn’t sure how I would respond to a novel about young people finding themselves. I am over forty years beyond that age. But the fine writing and characterization was captivating, the sense of place and time is vivid. Owen’s story is about turning out different from your family, escaping the fate of your peers. Alma’s family history is filled with horror and tragedy, and finding the American Dream.
Author Lee Cole captures America in the age of Trump, opioid addiction, and anti-immigrant sentiment.
The morning after the election that brought Trump into office, Rodin’s The Thinker was found spray painted with swastikas. Owen thinks, “from here on out. We would be crass and ugly, and nothing would be hidden.” His coworker Rando announces that he has “always voted for the anti-establishment candidate…Anybody who’s gonna shake the system up.” He believes that the votes aren’t even counted, that “its all decided behind closed doors by the big banks and the one-percenters.”
Owen’s hometown peers have crashed and burned into addiction, jail, and early death. He takes Alma to Cracker Barrel, explaining its country food and farm decor’s familiarity to working class people, noting that the waitress “had the look of someone on the precipice of ruin.” Visiting Owen’s mom, Alma must contend with the penchant for pork, the separate bedrooms for her and Owen, his mom’s preference for his last girlfriend who she is still in contact with, and her rejection of evolution. Later, Alma muses,” why would an intelligent designer make a universe that resulted in all this? In genocide and capitalism and Taco Bell?”
The question is if their love affair can span their differences, and if their careers are more important. Cole makes us care about these characters.
I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
So, when the main character in Groundskeeping told about the annual Halloween event of soaking a bale of hay in kerosene, lighting it on fire, and rolling it down the hill into downtown, I perfectly understood his hometown.
“I’ve always had the same predicament. When I’m home, in Kentucky, all I want is to leave. When I’m away, I’m homesick for a place that never was.” These were Owen’s first words to Alma when they met at a party. She tells him she is from “a country that no longer exists,” her Muslin family refugees from Bosnia.
Alma is a visiting writer on fellowship at Ashby College. She went to an ivy league school. Her family is well off. After college, Own had faltered, became addicted to opioids, and recovered, and now is working at the college so he could take one free writing class a semester. Owen is a groundskeeper living with his elderly grandfather, who watches John Wayne movies, and his disabled, disgruntled, Trumpite uncle. His parents are divorced, his mother a evangelical Christian married to a Trump voter and his father caring for a wife dying of cancer. Owen longs to escapee the Bible Belt and everything it stands for.
They could not be more different. They become lovers. But life is not a novel or a movie. Sometimes there is no happily ever after. Not when it’s a choice between love and career.
I wasn’t sure how I would respond to a novel about young people finding themselves. I am over forty years beyond that age. But the fine writing and characterization was captivating, the sense of place and time is vivid. Owen’s story is about turning out different from your family, escaping the fate of your peers. Alma’s family history is filled with horror and tragedy, and finding the American Dream.
Author Lee Cole captures America in the age of Trump, opioid addiction, and anti-immigrant sentiment.
The morning after the election that brought Trump into office, Rodin’s The Thinker was found spray painted with swastikas. Owen thinks, “from here on out. We would be crass and ugly, and nothing would be hidden.” His coworker Rando announces that he has “always voted for the anti-establishment candidate…Anybody who’s gonna shake the system up.” He believes that the votes aren’t even counted, that “its all decided behind closed doors by the big banks and the one-percenters.”
Owen’s hometown peers have crashed and burned into addiction, jail, and early death. He takes Alma to Cracker Barrel, explaining its country food and farm decor’s familiarity to working class people, noting that the waitress “had the look of someone on the precipice of ruin.” Visiting Owen’s mom, Alma must contend with the penchant for pork, the separate bedrooms for her and Owen, his mom’s preference for his last girlfriend who she is still in contact with, and her rejection of evolution. Later, Alma muses,” why would an intelligent designer make a universe that resulted in all this? In genocide and capitalism and Taco Bell?”
The question is if their love affair can span their differences, and if their careers are more important. Cole makes us care about these characters.
I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-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
slow-paced
As someone whose family has also been in Kentucky for hundreds of years and also had to/needed to/loved to/hated to leave, this book spoke to my soul.