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A review by balletbookworm
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
4.0
Picked this up back when it got on the Booker shortlist in 2019 and just didn't get around to it until now (it's a 1000+ page chunker without real chapter breaks and what seems like no real sentences, so it takes some advance planning).
I figured it would be a good book to work on while at home post-surgery so I popped it on my 23 in 2023 reading list. I worked out that if I concentrated on reading 50+ pages at a time, it would make the book doable. What also helped was the realization that the narrator's stream-of-consciousness internal nattering is broken up approximately every 50-70 pages by parts of a short story about a mother mountain lion who is separated from her cubs; eventually, the narrator's and cat's stories will cross paths.
So I got it read. And it is really interesting in the way that this internal chatter just caroms around from subject to subject almost like the narrator is talking to herself. A lot of it is really relatable - how do we cope with environmental pollution, physical health, children's safety, climate change, gun violence (and WOW, this book having been written largely after the 2016 election and our mass shooting problem has got seemingly worse), women's work, our parents' lives, and on and on. The page edges look like a hedgehog with all the paper tabs I used.
I figured it would be a good book to work on while at home post-surgery so I popped it on my 23 in 2023 reading list. I worked out that if I concentrated on reading 50+ pages at a time, it would make the book doable. What also helped was the realization that the narrator's stream-of-consciousness internal nattering is broken up approximately every 50-70 pages by parts of a short story about a mother mountain lion who is separated from her cubs; eventually, the narrator's and cat's stories will cross paths.
So I got it read. And it is really interesting in the way that this internal chatter just caroms around from subject to subject almost like the narrator is talking to herself. A lot of it is really relatable - how do we cope with environmental pollution, physical health, children's safety, climate change, gun violence (and WOW, this book having been written largely after the 2016 election and our mass shooting problem has got seemingly worse), women's work, our parents' lives, and on and on. The page edges look like a hedgehog with all the paper tabs I used.