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A review by sleightoffeet
The New Yorkers by Cathleen Schine
2.0
I didn't dislike it enough to stop reading, but it was kind of boring, and there were a lot of inconsistencies that jumped out at me. I should have loved this book! It had lots of characters and little sub plots and dogs too, but it just didn't hit.
This is a book about a bunch of New Yorkers, many with dogs, that live on the same street and run into and interact with each other. Some get along, some don't, some may get along very well at some point.
In addition to it being bland, I don't know if the author could decide whether she wanted the narrator to be in the 3rd or 1st person. The narrator wasn't its own character, but would randomly interject a thought in the first person, which I found disconcerting. The narrator was omniscient, and therefore couldn't really be a person running around and knowing everyone's thoughts and feelings.
The characters themselves weren't really distinctive, most of them remained static throughout. The one antagonist did such a 180 by the end of the book that it made Scrooge's transformation in A Christmas Carol look absolutely commonplace.
Again, I didn't hate it, but it was very blah.
This is a book about a bunch of New Yorkers, many with dogs, that live on the same street and run into and interact with each other. Some get along, some don't, some may get along very well at some point.
In addition to it being bland, I don't know if the author could decide whether she wanted the narrator to be in the 3rd or 1st person. The narrator wasn't its own character, but would randomly interject a thought in the first person, which I found disconcerting. The narrator was omniscient, and therefore couldn't really be a person running around and knowing everyone's thoughts and feelings.
The characters themselves weren't really distinctive, most of them remained static throughout. The one antagonist did such a 180 by the end of the book that it made Scrooge's transformation in A Christmas Carol look absolutely commonplace.
Again, I didn't hate it, but it was very blah.