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3.41 AVERAGE
3.41 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
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
Skipper should have gotten the baby in the end
It wasn't what I was expecting - which was something cheesy. I liked it. It was an easy, enjoyable read.
emotional
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Moderate: Infidelity, Suicide
A lovely book. Anna Quindlen's writing style is smooth and clear. And the story was engaging, although the downer toward the end seemed inevitable from the beginning. A lot of sadness in the story, but she didn't wallow in it. A good read.
This book tells the story of a baby left on the garage steps at the house named Blessings. The house's new caretaker, Skip, finds her and wants to raise her as his own. He hides her from the world until the house's mistress, Lydia, questions why he mows the lawn hunched over. (The baby is in a sling around him, and he's hiding her while mowing. He's too afraid to leave her alone.) Lydia decides to help him raise the baby, despite the fact that she is nearing 80 and hasn't been around a baby in sixty years. Skip just got out of prison before starting work at Blessings, and the book includes incidents with his former group of "friends" and the cops. Nadine, Lydia's housekeeper is amusing and stern, if that combination is possible. This was a great, quick read.
11/15/2004 Moore Library Book Discussion and
02/28/2005 Noble Reader Book Discussion
02/28/2005 Noble Reader Book Discussion
This book started out SOOO SLOW, but then all of a sudden it grabbed me and wouldn't get me go! What a great novel about relationships, second chances, assumptions, class distinctions, and how we get trapped in our own stereotypes. The ending was totally disappointing, but not a complete letdown, if that makes any sense.
If you can make it past the first 1/3 of the book, you won't regret it! During the entire beginning, however, all I could think was that Mrs. Blessing had her head so far up her ass that she may NEVER have seen the light of day.
Again, just chant "this too shall pass," and you'll get to the juicy, meaty, medium rare buffalo burger part of this novel, and you won't be able to put it down until you're finished and you have juicy goodness running off both elbows :) [sorry vegetarians, I REALLY meant tempeh juice!:]
If you can make it past the first 1/3 of the book, you won't regret it! During the entire beginning, however, all I could think was that Mrs. Blessing had her head so far up her ass that she may NEVER have seen the light of day.
Again, just chant "this too shall pass," and you'll get to the juicy, meaty, medium rare buffalo burger part of this novel, and you won't be able to put it down until you're finished and you have juicy goodness running off both elbows :) [sorry vegetarians, I REALLY meant tempeh juice!:]
Blessings is the name of a country estate owned by the wealthy Blessing family. Mrs. Blessing, an elderly woman, lives alone there. She has a Korean housekeeper, whose daughter, Jennifer, also enters into the story. Finally there is the young male groundskeeper who lives above the garage. Their lives are brought together when a baby is abandoned on the entry to the garage apartment. Not only does the baby bring unlikely people together, but she helps them resolve their pasts. The ending is not a fairy tale one, and even though it doesn't end as nicely as you could wish, it does offer hope. I liked this book a lot. There were some swear words, but no sex scenes. The message of hope for the future and of moving beyond what you've been dealt was good. I did have a hard time sometimes figuring out what was a flashback and what was happening in real life. Other than that, I probably would have given it a four-star rating.
With reminiscences by the two main characters bordering on stream-of-consciousness, this reminded me of Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf for dummies, that is, because Quindlen spells everything out for her reader. Anyone would realize by the middle of the book that two of the characters are a clandestine homosexual couple, but Quindlen makes this "reveal" explicit through a bit of dialogue, a photograph, the note on the back of the photograph, a character's internal reaction, and finally a bit of gossip recalled by another character. A more trusting writer would have left most of this unwritten. Also predictable was the bit about the boxes in the attic.