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3.76 AVERAGE
3.76 AVERAGE
I really hated this one at first, but then the writing and characters grew on me! Plot twist, I liked it a lot!
I won this by way of First Reads.
I read this in just under 4 hours. Just finished it moments ago. It was a good novel. Midwestern. I grew up and currently live in Minnesota, so imagining this small town was almost too easy for me. I just have to open my door and a drive a few miles to the nearest small town. The characters were believable. It was just a good coming of age in your thirties novel.
I read from various places and from other GoodReads reviews that this sort of follows Bon Iver (Justin Vernon), and that the author went to high school with him. I did listen to Bon Iver and The Civil Wars while reading and it was a perfect background noise to the novel.
I read this in just under 4 hours. Just finished it moments ago. It was a good novel. Midwestern. I grew up and currently live in Minnesota, so imagining this small town was almost too easy for me. I just have to open my door and a drive a few miles to the nearest small town. The characters were believable. It was just a good coming of age in your thirties novel.
I read from various places and from other GoodReads reviews that this sort of follows Bon Iver (Justin Vernon), and that the author went to high school with him. I did listen to Bon Iver and The Civil Wars while reading and it was a perfect background noise to the novel.
It's Midwestern guy lit. Four childhood friends come back to their hometown in Wisconsin to learn who they are, where they’ve been, and what they want. It's told in 5 unique voices. Excellent debut.
The audio is pretty well done! I like how the author really did shift voices in his writing of each character, and having different narrators for each character enhanced that aspect. I thought the plot and setting were fantastic. My only quibble is that sometimes it felt like it was a little overwritten; like the author is really stretching to make the Lee character have these deep insights about "America" that just felt a little unnecessary. I enjoyed that it was literary fiction but had so many masculine aspects. And, like many of the reviews, I appreciated that it wasn't afraid to be sentimental.
Butler is a talented prose stylist, and he writes with a moving sincerity. That said, the novel's treatment of small-town life is simplistic and sentimentalized. The characters all seem to have a binary view of their small town as a wholesome place where everyone is poor but honest and hard-working and loyal, while city dwellers and outsiders are all rich, shallow, and (in one memorable case) prone to random violence. This could be written off as the biases of the first-person narrators, but the book itself never really challenges it.
(Disclaimer: I've spent most of my life in small towns.)
(Disclaimer: I've spent most of my life in small towns.)
I read this book because I could relate to the place that the story was happening but I just couldn't get into the storyline. So Gave it up.
I listened to an ARC on audio. I loved it! Even when the weather was a nippy 20 degrees, I stayed in my car after I got home, just to hear a few more moments. Although the story is artfully arranged through several voices, each one is distinct and engaging. The lives of these characters is interesting, but not sensational. Well-written and quite enjoyable.
The last book I read in 2019 (though I finished the last two chapters at the start of 2020). This was my favorite read of 2019, a book that I couldn't put down, that made me laugh, cry, and wish that this would be a limited series on Netflix, or HBO.
Vivid descriptions that made me actually miss my time in the midwest, characters that felt familiar and different, and like people I enjoy meeting and being friends with. An honest look at friendship, the good and the bad and all the in-betweens, especially of friendships that have lasted most of a lifetime. It is also a story about family, marriage, and love - both requited and unrequited. It is about forgiveness, too. Something we could all use a little of/learn a little from.
It's complicated to grow up with people and keep them close as you grow and change. It's even more tricky when there are mixed feelings, and love in places it doesn't belong, and when things like fame, trauma, financial issues, and injuries come in to play.
The only thing I wish is that we'd been given more of the women characters in the book. I loved all of them - Beth, Lucy, Felicia, and Chloe - and I wanted more. More of Ronnie, too...but maybe this is part of the appeal of this book. The characters are so rich you can't help but want more of them.
By the end of the book I felt like I knew all of the friends in Little Wing. I felt so attached to them that I found myself crying at two key moments...maybe three (the third was happy tears). I don't want to spoil anything, but trust me, if you read this you will care a lot of them all, too.
Now the challenge is going to be leaving Little Wing (as some of the characters did) and moving into a new book/place for the new year.
Vivid descriptions that made me actually miss my time in the midwest, characters that felt familiar and different, and like people I enjoy meeting and being friends with. An honest look at friendship, the good and the bad and all the in-betweens, especially of friendships that have lasted most of a lifetime. It is also a story about family, marriage, and love - both requited and unrequited. It is about forgiveness, too. Something we could all use a little of/learn a little from.
It's complicated to grow up with people and keep them close as you grow and change. It's even more tricky when there are mixed feelings, and love in places it doesn't belong, and when things like fame, trauma, financial issues, and injuries come in to play.
The only thing I wish is that we'd been given more of the women characters in the book. I loved all of them - Beth, Lucy, Felicia, and Chloe - and I wanted more. More of Ronnie, too...but maybe this is part of the appeal of this book. The characters are so rich you can't help but want more of them.
By the end of the book I felt like I knew all of the friends in Little Wing. I felt so attached to them that I found myself crying at two key moments...maybe three (the third was happy tears). I don't want to spoil anything, but trust me, if you read this you will care a lot of them all, too.
Now the challenge is going to be leaving Little Wing (as some of the characters did) and moving into a new book/place for the new year.
I try to reserve my 5-star ratings for the extraordinary, so I wish I could give this a 4.5. I really liked this book, a story of four friends and their small town hometown told from each of their perspectives and from that of one of their wives, another childhood friend. The first person narratives each had a distinctive voice without overdoing it. A great book about friendship, love, and most importantly how we each define success.
emotional
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes