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knuckledown 's review for:
Lives of Girls and Women
by Alice Munro
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.