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3.84 AVERAGE
3.84 AVERAGE
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
inspiring
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book isn’t a fast paced read, it doesn’t have a riveting plot line but that’s the good thing about it. The reader is following along with the girl’s life and is getting her inner thoughts about what is happening as she grows into a woman. These are all thoughts and some experiences I have had as a young woman growing up and it made it easy to connect.
I think this book is for all females to read and would allow growing girls a resource to help figure out what they’re experiencing. If I ever have a daughter I would definitely recommend it to her.
I think this book is for all females to read and would allow growing girls a resource to help figure out what they’re experiencing. If I ever have a daughter I would definitely recommend it to her.
Alice Munro is principally a short story writer. This is a novel, but really it feels like a book of eight short stories about the same girl at different points in her life, from hitting puberty to the brink of adulthood. Each story focuses on different people in her life so that there isn't a lot of ongoing conflict throughout the book as a whole. What makes it flow is the evolution of Del's character.
I dragged my feet through the early years, but I felt more interest once Del began dealing with her "budding sexuality." (I'm not sure what that says about me.) Most of it isn't romantic, but instead painfully real.
There is something about Munro's style that doesn't sit right with me. I can't simply blame it on her habit of hooking many sentences together with semi-colons, or how she lets sentence fragments masquerade as complete sentences. She also loves to do in-depth descriptions of characters' appearance and personality. In a way I'm impressed by authors who can really paint a physical picture of a character. It just isn't the way my mind works. I tend to focus on the innards of a person. In her descriptions Munro often gives a list of adjectives that are almost too much for the brain to handle. I would prefer that she find just the right word or two.
I dragged my feet through the early years, but I felt more interest once Del began dealing with her "budding sexuality." (I'm not sure what that says about me.) Most of it isn't romantic, but instead painfully real.
There is something about Munro's style that doesn't sit right with me. I can't simply blame it on her habit of hooking many sentences together with semi-colons, or how she lets sentence fragments masquerade as complete sentences. She also loves to do in-depth descriptions of characters' appearance and personality. In a way I'm impressed by authors who can really paint a physical picture of a character. It just isn't the way my mind works. I tend to focus on the innards of a person. In her descriptions Munro often gives a list of adjectives that are almost too much for the brain to handle. I would prefer that she find just the right word or two.
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content
Moderate: Sexism, Sexual harassment
Minor: Pedophilia, Toxic relationship, Toxic friendship
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Sexual assault
I was forced to read this initially back in 2008, in a pathetic excuse for a literary appreciation class for my MLIS. rereading it now 5 years later has made me change my mind on it, as I'm now allowed to think my own thoughts, and I'm reading it because I want to, and not for half asked literary analysis. this review is turning more into a review of my course, so I'll end it here.
emotional
hopeful
relaxing
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
A glorious, mid-century, post-Barbie read. Alice Munro is singular. Slow and meandering, Del evokes deep sympathy, rage, compassion, and envy all at once. A beautiful-- and yet not punishing-- account of a child's bewilderment and outrage as she realizes her own girlhood, her inevitable womanhood, with all the horror and beauty and ruin and loneliness it all entails.
Essentials:
"Madeleine herself was like something he might have made up. We remembered her like a story, and having nothing else to give we gave her our strange, belated, heartless applause. 'Madeleine! That madwoman!'"
"I felt it was not so different from all the other advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumed being female made you damageable, that a certain amount of carefulness and solemn fuss and self-protection were called for, whereas men were supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what they didn't want and come back proud. Without even thinking about it, I decided to do the same."
"She was a woman I would recognize now [...] as one of those heavy, cautiously moving, wrecked survivors of the female life, with stories to tell."
"To be made of flesh was humiliation."
"Stories of the past could go like this, round and round and round down to death; I expected it."
"This was what I expected sexual communication to be -- a flash of insanity, a dreamlike, ruthless, contemptuous breakthrough in a world of decent appearances. [...] Was this what desire was? Wish to know, fear to know, amounting to anguish?"
"We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that people do see that, and go on, and hate and fight and try to kill each other, various ways, then love some more."
"Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes on its own, its natural and callous importance."
"The future could be furnished without love. [...] Now, at last without fantasies or self-deception, cut off from the mistakes and confusion of the past, grave and simple, carrying a small suitcase, getting on a bus, like girls in movies leaving home, continents, lovers-- I supposed I would get started on my real life."
"Such questions persist, in spite of novels. It is a shock, when you have dealt so cunningly, powerfully, with reality, to come back and find it still there."
Essentials:
"Madeleine herself was like something he might have made up. We remembered her like a story, and having nothing else to give we gave her our strange, belated, heartless applause. 'Madeleine! That madwoman!'"
"I felt it was not so different from all the other advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumed being female made you damageable, that a certain amount of carefulness and solemn fuss and self-protection were called for, whereas men were supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what they didn't want and come back proud. Without even thinking about it, I decided to do the same."
"She was a woman I would recognize now [...] as one of those heavy, cautiously moving, wrecked survivors of the female life, with stories to tell."
"To be made of flesh was humiliation."
"Stories of the past could go like this, round and round and round down to death; I expected it."
"This was what I expected sexual communication to be -- a flash of insanity, a dreamlike, ruthless, contemptuous breakthrough in a world of decent appearances. [...] Was this what desire was? Wish to know, fear to know, amounting to anguish?"
"We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that people do see that, and go on, and hate and fight and try to kill each other, various ways, then love some more."
"Unconnected to the life of love, uncolored by love, the world resumes on its own, its natural and callous importance."
"The future could be furnished without love. [...] Now, at last without fantasies or self-deception, cut off from the mistakes and confusion of the past, grave and simple, carrying a small suitcase, getting on a bus, like girls in movies leaving home, continents, lovers-- I supposed I would get started on my real life."
"Such questions persist, in spite of novels. It is a shock, when you have dealt so cunningly, powerfully, with reality, to come back and find it still there."
adventurous
lighthearted
reflective
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:
N/A