Scan barcode
A review by lelia_t
The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken
4.0
I loved the way McCracken plays with the reader's expectation. As I read, I laughed out loud many times and I also felt like I was listening to a friend who was grappling with her feelings after her mothers’ death. Creating this fictional voice seems to have made space for McCracken to explore a deeply meaningful subject and it gives her cover for engaging in the taboo-breaking act of writing about private matters. Over and over the book lays bare layers of things that are kept quiet until the death of a mother allows the home/family dynamics to be unpacked and examined. But this isn’t the kind of exploration of family that the narrator's (or McCracken’s?) mother would have hated, full of reproach and blame. McCracken manages to honor both her own need to examine her unique upbringing and family life and to honor her admirable mother.
-----
One of the reviews on the book jacket calls this book “taut” which surprised me because I associate taut books with tension, something I don’t feel while reading this. In fact, having read this twice now, I found both times there’s a specific moment in this book that makes me laugh until I cry. But upon rereading the book, I realized that anywhere you open it you find something that ties to or elucidates another part of the book - so it is taut, like a finely woven spider web where everything connects and holds together.
McCracken takes such care in contemplating words and their meanings and which words matter. There's the wordplay she does ("I am dogged, you are stubborn, she's pigheaded."), but also an examination of words as labels that limit or free us and the labels we give books - this is a novel not a memoir. She also explores the sanctity of each person's/family's inner life and the tension between wanting to keep that inner life private vs needing to probe it, make what's unconscious conscious and share what you learn.
It's really a marvelous book - one that I want to start all over again as soon as I've finished it.
-----
One of the reviews on the book jacket calls this book “taut” which surprised me because I associate taut books with tension, something I don’t feel while reading this. In fact, having read this twice now, I found both times there’s a specific moment in this book that makes me laugh until I cry. But upon rereading the book, I realized that anywhere you open it you find something that ties to or elucidates another part of the book - so it is taut, like a finely woven spider web where everything connects and holds together.
McCracken takes such care in contemplating words and their meanings and which words matter. There's the wordplay she does ("I am dogged, you are stubborn, she's pigheaded."), but also an examination of words as labels that limit or free us and the labels we give books - this is a novel not a memoir. She also explores the sanctity of each person's/family's inner life and the tension between wanting to keep that inner life private vs needing to probe it, make what's unconscious conscious and share what you learn.
It's really a marvelous book - one that I want to start all over again as soon as I've finished it.