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A review by lifelivedbooked
Hieroglyphics by Jill McCorkle
4.0
Heiroglyphics by Jill McCorkle tells the tail of two families: Lil and Frank were attracted to each other by shared childhood tragedy and find themselves at their end of lives in the small NC town where Frank's childhood tragedy occurred. Shelley is a single mother and court recorder struggling to cope with the horror of her own childhood and protect her children from the stigma that type of childhood can bring to the victims. Shelley also happens to live in the very same home Frank did when he lived in NC as a boy.
The experience of reading this book was very much like spending several afternoons listening to your grandparents tell you the stories that were most formative in their lives, except this book doesn't leave out the bits your grandparents might omit for the sake of propriety. I love how this novel drips with nostalgia and imperfect memories. Lil's passages are written as journal entries, which especially adds to this feeling of times past. What is also effective is the way Lil and Frank recount their memories of the same events and time periods: each telling just slightly aligned to its owners biases and motivations.
If you love a book that goes deep on character development and don't need much plot to keep the pages turning, Hieroglyphics may be the book for you.. The writing is brilliant and I just loved the way McCorkle structured her story to really show us all the angles of who these characters are and how they became.
The experience of reading this book was very much like spending several afternoons listening to your grandparents tell you the stories that were most formative in their lives, except this book doesn't leave out the bits your grandparents might omit for the sake of propriety. I love how this novel drips with nostalgia and imperfect memories. Lil's passages are written as journal entries, which especially adds to this feeling of times past. What is also effective is the way Lil and Frank recount their memories of the same events and time periods: each telling just slightly aligned to its owners biases and motivations.
If you love a book that goes deep on character development and don't need much plot to keep the pages turning, Hieroglyphics may be the book for you.. The writing is brilliant and I just loved the way McCorkle structured her story to really show us all the angles of who these characters are and how they became.