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3.84 AVERAGE
3.84 AVERAGE
Beautiful prose, convincing characters with awesome stories behind (absolutely loved Del's mom and her spinster aunts), catchy coming of age novel, dealing with everything a girl faces, anywhere, anytime: family, friends, faith, love, sexuality and everything in between.
As someone who grew up in small town Ontario, Munro's slow, almost liminal writing makes total sense... Too much sense as I found this book extremely boring and mundane. I appreciate her appreciation of the mundane, especially because that appreciation made living in my own small Ontarian town survivable. I guess I just don't chase that appreciation in the literature I read.
“People’s lives...were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable- deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum”. A classically Canadian coming-of-age read, loved it.
I understand while Alice Munro is a short story writer. She recognized her strength and went for it. This book reads like a collection of short stories, and, as such, is quite boring and repetitive. Read, with a bit of time between stories, with all the masterful details, it would probably be a delight.
There are some beautifully written parts, but I found the pacing inconsistent and there were some plot elements that just got left hanging that I would've liked to see properly resolved.
EXACT RATING: 3.50 stars
After reading three separate short story collections by Munro over the past several years, I decided to give her only novel a try. “Lives of Girls and Women” had most of what I love about Alice Munro’s writing - familiar characters with resonant inner monologues going through situations that although very different from my own life experiences are somehow completely relatable. I also want to note, as I have before, that Munro is my absolute favorite author at this point for writing about sex and romance. She is really able to capture the mystery and the wonder of it all from multiple stages of life. In this novel specifically, Del and her bestie Naomi wonder about sex and love in immature childish ways when they are young, and then come to view sex in a very different desperate, animalistic way as teenagers, and then in a more realistic but no less fantastic way once they’ve experienced it. And I’m talking mostly about sex here, but I really do mean to include love and romance and infatuation as well. With many small details, she captures the feeling of what it’s like to have a crush on the star of your high school play, or what it’s like to feel desired even when that want isn’t reciprocated.
But for whatever reason, I don’t think Munro’s storytelling works quite as well in a novel format. There were times especially when Del was young when the story lost any perceptible focus and spent too many pages talking about a side character’s fox-hide business or something along those lines. I thought it would feel more rewarding to follow one of Munro’s characters for longer than 60 pages, but I felt no more attached to Del than I have to many of her short-story protagonists. I suppose that in some light that is a tribute to her skill in writing characters that draw you in quickly.
I wonder if this book is very roughly autobiographical in any sense? Del ends up being an almost-writer, and the final chapter talks about how she’s driven to capture the feeling of life in small-town Canada, which is basically all Munro does.
After reading three separate short story collections by Munro over the past several years, I decided to give her only novel a try. “Lives of Girls and Women” had most of what I love about Alice Munro’s writing - familiar characters with resonant inner monologues going through situations that although very different from my own life experiences are somehow completely relatable. I also want to note, as I have before, that Munro is my absolute favorite author at this point for writing about sex and romance. She is really able to capture the mystery and the wonder of it all from multiple stages of life. In this novel specifically, Del and her bestie Naomi wonder about sex and love in immature childish ways when they are young, and then come to view sex in a very different desperate, animalistic way as teenagers, and then in a more realistic but no less fantastic way once they’ve experienced it. And I’m talking mostly about sex here, but I really do mean to include love and romance and infatuation as well. With many small details, she captures the feeling of what it’s like to have a crush on the star of your high school play, or what it’s like to feel desired even when that want isn’t reciprocated.
But for whatever reason, I don’t think Munro’s storytelling works quite as well in a novel format. There were times especially when Del was young when the story lost any perceptible focus and spent too many pages talking about a side character’s fox-hide business or something along those lines. I thought it would feel more rewarding to follow one of Munro’s characters for longer than 60 pages, but I felt no more attached to Del than I have to many of her short-story protagonists. I suppose that in some light that is a tribute to her skill in writing characters that draw you in quickly.
I wonder if this book is very roughly autobiographical in any sense? Del ends up being an almost-writer, and the final chapter talks about how she’s driven to capture the feeling of life in small-town Canada, which is basically all Munro does.
no me gusta su estilo, no me convence.
medium-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
Poprawna, ale się nie wciągnęłam i trochę stała się obowiązkiem, a nie przyjemnością. Porzuciłam w 2/3. Może wzięłam się za nią w złym momencie. Spróbuję inne Munro.
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced