Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.34 AVERAGE
3.34 AVERAGE
Eh. In theory, this seemed like a book I would love, but it didn't really do it for me.
He's the sort of author I cant resist visiting despite multiple disappointments (just managed to resist Lionel Shriver...shes even more of that sort w downright offensive books I seriously disliked but whose brilliance I recognize). This wasn't terrible but wasn't great either. I may, admittedly, be tougher when I know what an author has the talent to pull off
Certainly props for the last 20pp. Appreciated a lot about the ending
Certainly props for the last 20pp. Appreciated a lot about the ending
I really liked the book, the writing style, the Idea of the story, it was all really nice but the end just blew me. It turned everything around, just stunning.
Ostensibly a spy novel, this is really just the story of an aggravating young woman’s petty affairs dressed up as a spy novel. The ending should be a shocking twist, but it felt more like a smug, self-satisfied smirk by McEwan.
Serena Frome is a beautiful, conceited, selfish recent Cambridge graduate doing secretarial work for MI5. She did maths at Cambridge, because she is naturally clever at maths, but only got a third because she is lazy and doesn’t like to work for things. She has an affair with a married professor. She’s happy being his mistress, dreams of being something more, then gets suddenly and cruelly dumped. But not before he’s mentored her to join MI5 (mostly by making her read a lot of newspapers. No dead-drops, trailing, disguises, or other fun spy stuff). Turns out her lover has cancer, so wants to go off and die in peace without his young lover witnessing his decline. Oh, and he also gave secrets to the Soviets because they blackmailed him about a different affair early in his first marriage.
Serena is devastated but goes off and dutifully joins MI5. Because this is the sexist 60s (70s? I think 60s. Whatever, I don’t actually care) the ladies who come in mainly do secretarial work, and there is a definite glass ceiling. It seems more like a dating pool for the “right” men and women – smart girls from the right families who got firsts at Oxbridge working for a bit before marrying smart boys from the right families who got firsts at Oxbridge. MI5: the Match.com of the postwar period!
Serena is brought in to MI5 likely just for her connection to the professor. She is then assigned to the Sweet Tooth project, an ill-conceived notion to fund authors in the Culture War between the West and the Soviet Union. Serena gets assigned to Tom, a young and unknown novelist. She falls in love with him by reading his stories, which seems like a lot of drivel to me. Tom is a short story writer, and he writes pseudo-intellectual bits, like one about a man falling desperately in love with a mannequin because of her cold disdain, but ultimately breaking up with her because of this same remote coldness. And one about a man in an unhappy marriage whose wife sells their property and pretends it was a burglary, and then he finds out, but is turned on by the deceit. You’d think that Serena would be worried by the fact that all of Tom’s short stories involve terrible, screwed-up relationships and pathetic men, but nope.
It makes much more sense when you find out in the end that THIS ENTIRE BOOK WAS WRITTEN BY TOM, SUCKERS. It’s Tom’s book about his and Serena's relationship written from Serena’s perspective. This might be some of the reason Serena comes across as such an idiot and Tom comes across as so beloved. Serena is obsessed with Tom from the very beginning, for no good reason. And Tom’s writing is praised as utterly brilliant, when it comes across as mediocre MFA drivel. Also, I thought it was just bad writing that Serena’s synopsis of Tom’s short stories and the italicized quotes from the novels sounded so similar in style. It wasn’t McEwan who was the bad writer, it was Tom!!
Serena quickly begins an affair with Tom, which subjects the poor reader to awkward sex scenes. Oh God, the awkward sex scenes. Why, Tom, why? Serena is supposedly off-book with having the affair with Tom. As far as I can tell, her only job was to get Tom to take the Foundation money. After that, she had completed her assignment. There was no directive to “handle” Tom. She just decided to date him for the fun of it. Because she likes inaccessible, selfish men apparently.
There’s far too long spent on their relationship, then news breaks of Tom’s funding by the government and then his relationship with Serena (leaked to the press by Serena’s jealous boss, because MI5 has never heard of professionalism and instead is nothing but a collection of embittered snobs). And then Serena finds a letter from Tom (one of those unnecessarily long letters that only occur in literary fiction, because it’s nothing an actual human would write to another) outlining the fact that he’s known for months and that in fact he’s written a book – THIS BOOK YOU ARE NOW READING – about Serena. And then I just groan and chuck the book out the window.
This was such a boring book. Serena might as well not have been a spy. SHE DIDN’T DO ANYTHING. She spent half a minute trying to get Tom to take secret government money, and then that was it. That was the extent of her spying. I mean, this is probably much closer to actual spy work than James Bond. But there’s a reason why very few books are about what people actually do. Would anyone watch a Law & Order about actual law work? No!
It seemed like McEwan really wanted to write a nonfiction book about 1960s (70s??) Cold War Britain. There’s pages and pages about British politics and society at the time. Since there was actually no plot, it didn’t technically get in the way of the plot. But it didn’t make it any more interesting.
Also, it was just a little too on-the-nose that Tom’s short stories foreshadowed the ending of this book. A short story about an author writing her second novel as narrated by her ape lover – when really it was the author who was writing it all along and there was no ape lover! Or the short story about the man who knew about his wife’s duplicity and it only made their love-making sweeter! Eye roll! What a self-indulgent piece of crap.
Serena Frome is a beautiful, conceited, selfish recent Cambridge graduate doing secretarial work for MI5. She did maths at Cambridge, because she is naturally clever at maths, but only got a third because she is lazy and doesn’t like to work for things. She has an affair with a married professor. She’s happy being his mistress, dreams of being something more, then gets suddenly and cruelly dumped. But not before he’s mentored her to join MI5 (mostly by making her read a lot of newspapers. No dead-drops, trailing, disguises, or other fun spy stuff). Turns out her lover has cancer, so wants to go off and die in peace without his young lover witnessing his decline. Oh, and he also gave secrets to the Soviets because they blackmailed him about a different affair early in his first marriage.
Serena is devastated but goes off and dutifully joins MI5. Because this is the sexist 60s (70s? I think 60s. Whatever, I don’t actually care) the ladies who come in mainly do secretarial work, and there is a definite glass ceiling. It seems more like a dating pool for the “right” men and women – smart girls from the right families who got firsts at Oxbridge working for a bit before marrying smart boys from the right families who got firsts at Oxbridge. MI5: the Match.com of the postwar period!
Serena is brought in to MI5 likely just for her connection to the professor. She is then assigned to the Sweet Tooth project, an ill-conceived notion to fund authors in the Culture War between the West and the Soviet Union. Serena gets assigned to Tom, a young and unknown novelist. She falls in love with him by reading his stories, which seems like a lot of drivel to me. Tom is a short story writer, and he writes pseudo-intellectual bits, like one about a man falling desperately in love with a mannequin because of her cold disdain, but ultimately breaking up with her because of this same remote coldness. And one about a man in an unhappy marriage whose wife sells their property and pretends it was a burglary, and then he finds out, but is turned on by the deceit. You’d think that Serena would be worried by the fact that all of Tom’s short stories involve terrible, screwed-up relationships and pathetic men, but nope.
It makes much more sense when you find out in the end that THIS ENTIRE BOOK WAS WRITTEN BY TOM, SUCKERS. It’s Tom’s book about his and Serena's relationship written from Serena’s perspective. This might be some of the reason Serena comes across as such an idiot and Tom comes across as so beloved. Serena is obsessed with Tom from the very beginning, for no good reason. And Tom’s writing is praised as utterly brilliant, when it comes across as mediocre MFA drivel. Also, I thought it was just bad writing that Serena’s synopsis of Tom’s short stories and the italicized quotes from the novels sounded so similar in style. It wasn’t McEwan who was the bad writer, it was Tom!!
Serena quickly begins an affair with Tom, which subjects the poor reader to awkward sex scenes. Oh God, the awkward sex scenes. Why, Tom, why? Serena is supposedly off-book with having the affair with Tom. As far as I can tell, her only job was to get Tom to take the Foundation money. After that, she had completed her assignment. There was no directive to “handle” Tom. She just decided to date him for the fun of it. Because she likes inaccessible, selfish men apparently.
There’s far too long spent on their relationship, then news breaks of Tom’s funding by the government and then his relationship with Serena (leaked to the press by Serena’s jealous boss, because MI5 has never heard of professionalism and instead is nothing but a collection of embittered snobs). And then Serena finds a letter from Tom (one of those unnecessarily long letters that only occur in literary fiction, because it’s nothing an actual human would write to another) outlining the fact that he’s known for months and that in fact he’s written a book – THIS BOOK YOU ARE NOW READING – about Serena. And then I just groan and chuck the book out the window.
This was such a boring book. Serena might as well not have been a spy. SHE DIDN’T DO ANYTHING. She spent half a minute trying to get Tom to take secret government money, and then that was it. That was the extent of her spying. I mean, this is probably much closer to actual spy work than James Bond. But there’s a reason why very few books are about what people actually do. Would anyone watch a Law & Order about actual law work? No!
It seemed like McEwan really wanted to write a nonfiction book about 1960s (70s??) Cold War Britain. There’s pages and pages about British politics and society at the time. Since there was actually no plot, it didn’t technically get in the way of the plot. But it didn’t make it any more interesting.
Also, it was just a little too on-the-nose that Tom’s short stories foreshadowed the ending of this book. A short story about an author writing her second novel as narrated by her ape lover – when really it was the author who was writing it all along and there was no ape lover! Or the short story about the man who knew about his wife’s duplicity and it only made their love-making sweeter! Eye roll! What a self-indulgent piece of crap.
Sweet Tooth was on its way to 5 stars until about 2/3 of the way...then not really sure what it turned in to.
McEwan did it again. He took my heart and mind and twisted them in every direction just so in the end he could try to flatten and iron them back into previous state. One can try as much as they want but there are some wrinkles you can't get out - those are the confusion, the sense of injustice, the overall soothing pain. Sometimes I think I must be a literary masochist for loving his works.
If I were to say anything about the book now, then I must admit - at first I strongly disliked the main character. Her snobbish attitude, her speed-reading habit (I find that every book - even a bad one- deserves to be read by every single letter), her inability to separate personal from professional, her need for a lover - I could continue listing the characteristics I disliked about her - but the reason behind all of that is simple: Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) is everything that I detest in myself. With every page I felt more similarities - what happened to her, had happened to me; whatever she felt, I had felt it too. Of course by that I mean the overall emotion of the scenes. And through that connection I became attached to her. Yet through another twist I started to doubt if I even knew her - I saw a vision of her, a glimpse at her life through someone else's eyes. And thus, after finishing another masterpiece by McEwan, I have only one question: Serena Frome, who are you?
If I were to say anything about the book now, then I must admit - at first I strongly disliked the main character. Her snobbish attitude, her speed-reading habit (I find that every book - even a bad one- deserves to be read by every single letter), her inability to separate personal from professional, her need for a lover - I could continue listing the characteristics I disliked about her - but the reason behind all of that is simple: Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) is everything that I detest in myself. With every page I felt more similarities - what happened to her, had happened to me; whatever she felt, I had felt it too. Of course by that I mean the overall emotion of the scenes. And through that connection I became attached to her. Yet through another twist I started to doubt if I even knew her - I saw a vision of her, a glimpse at her life through someone else's eyes. And thus, after finishing another masterpiece by McEwan, I have only one question: Serena Frome, who are you?
I really enjoyed this one. It is a quick read and not nearly as "heavy" as Atonement. The blurbs that describe it as a suspenseful thriller are a bit overdone I feel so someone in search of that would be happier to pass this one by I think.
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Wasn’t enjoying the style of writing at all
This was a great read. I loved the story, the characters and, most of all, the multiple literary references (including awards). The reason I didn't rate it 5 stars is that I didn't fall in love with any of it, but I'd obviously highly recommend it!