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A review by moonpie
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti
5.0
So I guess I'm officially a Hannah Tinti fan! The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley was filled with violence (not my fave) and a dude who's a bad person, overall, and a terrible father if you think about it too much, but we're supposed to feel sympathy for him, and normally that'd be enough to make me check out pretty fast. I couldn't stop reading this one, though.
I loved the novel's structure, wherein Hawley's daughter Loo's story switches off with flashbacks to various notable times in Hawley's life; I thought the characters were interesting even when they were mostly awful; and I wanted to know what happened next in both storylines badly enough that I ended up cheating a little. And to top it all off, Tinti's style is right up my alley. I didn't exactly imagine myself loving this novel when I read the description -- I only picked it up because I thought the cover was pretty and I liked The Good Thief -- but I enjoyed the heck out of it.
I loved the novel's structure, wherein Hawley's daughter Loo's story switches off with flashbacks to various notable times in Hawley's life; I thought the characters were interesting even when they were mostly awful; and I wanted to know what happened next in both storylines badly enough that I ended up cheating a little. And to top it all off, Tinti's style is right up my alley. I didn't exactly imagine myself loving this novel when I read the description -- I only picked it up because I thought the cover was pretty and I liked The Good Thief -- but I enjoyed the heck out of it.