A review by mendelbot
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

2.0

Buried somewhere beneath the muddled prose, the off-kilter dialogue, and the repetitious plot is a good book. But the above three aspects overwhelm an otherwise decent novel of a dysfunctional family. Pages upon pages of the title character speaking a kind of pidgin English/baby talk. Scenes that run into and out of each other. A book that is probably about 200 pages too long. I get what the author was going for, I just don't like it. When it works, it works wonderfully, but it works only about thirty percent of the time. The rest of the time I was waiting for one of these annoyingly miserable characters to kill the rest.