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A review by veingloria
Every Kind of Wanting by Gina Frangello
3.0
3.5 rounded down.
This was so close to being a 3.5 rounded up, but the last quarter of the novel landed completely flat for me and extinguished some of my goodwill for this story and these characters.
Frangello’s prose is immediately engrossing, rife with poetic melancholy. It is without a doubt the strongest element of this novel. I’m not sure if she has any poetry efforts under her belt, but I would love to see some from her. Her prose introduces flow and beauty into otherwise unpleasant or meandering scenes. This is ultimately what kept me turning the pages.
The questions that this story asks—what constitutes a family and who bears responsibility for their role in it—are interesting ones, but I don’t think they were answered in a satisfactory way.
Melodrama is an essential component of a story like this and it’s what I expected going in, but there’s a fine line between melodrama and soap opera. The story veers toward the latter as it progresses to the point where it threw me out of the story. I guess the characters’ personalities lend themselves well to a soap opera, though.
It’s difficult to wade through a story where everyone is kind of a shitty person. The only person who wasn’t awful was Chad, whose liberal charity betrays the kind of ignorant cheeriness that characterizes the upper crust of society. Gretchen is a stereotypical wife and mother trapped in a loveless marriage with a terrible man and she conspires to snatch Miguel and Chad’s child away from them; Nick is a cheating POS whose actions speak of utter selfishness, and Lina is much the same; Emily is a burn pit of resentment and contempt; and Miguel is an emotionally repressed mess with an airport’s worth of baggage.
You might argue that this is a very plausible group of characters and I would agree, but plausible does not make for a compelling or enjoyable read. It was difficult to discern whether Frangello intended to elicit sympathy for these people or whether she merely wanted to offer a window into their lives and allow us to make our own judgments. The navel-gazing of the last 25% of the book would suggest the former, but that’s purely speculation.
Spoilers, but I found it kinda gross and cheap that the climax of the story involves Emily dying. It felt like the easy way out rather than seeing her arc and development through to the end. She dies bitter and unfulfilled and her good-for-nothing husband gets to keep on. The timeskip also makes her death feel cheap especially given that the last line of her POV is Save me.
Despite my issues with this story, it’s still a very readable book about very unlikeable people. Frangello’s prose and emotional rendering are compelling enough to soften the edges.
This was so close to being a 3.5 rounded up, but the last quarter of the novel landed completely flat for me and extinguished some of my goodwill for this story and these characters.
Frangello’s prose is immediately engrossing, rife with poetic melancholy. It is without a doubt the strongest element of this novel. I’m not sure if she has any poetry efforts under her belt, but I would love to see some from her. Her prose introduces flow and beauty into otherwise unpleasant or meandering scenes. This is ultimately what kept me turning the pages.
The questions that this story asks—what constitutes a family and who bears responsibility for their role in it—are interesting ones, but I don’t think they were answered in a satisfactory way.
Melodrama is an essential component of a story like this and it’s what I expected going in, but there’s a fine line between melodrama and soap opera. The story veers toward the latter as it progresses to the point where it threw me out of the story. I guess the characters’ personalities lend themselves well to a soap opera, though.
It’s difficult to wade through a story where everyone is kind of a shitty person. The only person who wasn’t awful was Chad, whose liberal charity betrays the kind of ignorant cheeriness that characterizes the upper crust of society. Gretchen is a stereotypical wife and mother trapped in a loveless marriage with a terrible man and she conspires to snatch Miguel and Chad’s child away from them; Nick is a cheating POS whose actions speak of utter selfishness, and Lina is much the same; Emily is a burn pit of resentment and contempt; and Miguel is an emotionally repressed mess with an airport’s worth of baggage.
You might argue that this is a very plausible group of characters and I would agree, but plausible does not make for a compelling or enjoyable read. It was difficult to discern whether Frangello intended to elicit sympathy for these people or whether she merely wanted to offer a window into their lives and allow us to make our own judgments. The navel-gazing of the last 25% of the book would suggest the former, but that’s purely speculation.
Spoilers, but I found it kinda gross and cheap that the climax of the story involves Emily dying. It felt like the easy way out rather than seeing her arc and development through to the end. She dies bitter and unfulfilled and her good-for-nothing husband gets to keep on. The timeskip also makes her death feel cheap especially given that the last line of her POV is Save me.
Despite my issues with this story, it’s still a very readable book about very unlikeable people. Frangello’s prose and emotional rendering are compelling enough to soften the edges.