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A review by penelopesodyssey
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
4.0
This is a humdinger of a book! I only got through it by listening to it on Audible. beautifully narrated by Stephanie Ellen, whose tone is just right for the character of the narrator. She also varies her pitch a lot so that the lists don’t get monotonous.
The book consists entirely of lists of nouns or sentences beginning with “the fact that”. The narrator is a mother of 4 who makes her living by baking pies. We hear her thoughts as a stream of consciousness, as she considers her children, pies, gun crime, the death of her mother, her recent cancer, her husband, dreams, food , pollution and global warming, films and literature. The trivial and deep thoughts, reality and imagination are seamlessly woven together. By the end, I felt she was an intimate friend of mine, whose character and thoughts I knew so well, I could almost but not quite predict them. It is a long novel, during the course of which there are only five or six actual events, some of which are dramatic and life changing, but the emphasis is firmly kept on the narrator’s state of mind rather than the events themselves.
The narration is interspersed with the story of a mountain lion and her cubs. I thought the purpose of this was to contrast nature and civilisation; a lion mother and a human mother and how each one experiences fear, courage, instinct and the changing natural world.
The book consists entirely of lists of nouns or sentences beginning with “the fact that”. The narrator is a mother of 4 who makes her living by baking pies. We hear her thoughts as a stream of consciousness, as she considers her children, pies, gun crime, the death of her mother, her recent cancer, her husband, dreams, food , pollution and global warming, films and literature. The trivial and deep thoughts, reality and imagination are seamlessly woven together. By the end, I felt she was an intimate friend of mine, whose character and thoughts I knew so well, I could almost but not quite predict them. It is a long novel, during the course of which there are only five or six actual events, some of which are dramatic and life changing, but the emphasis is firmly kept on the narrator’s state of mind rather than the events themselves.
The narration is interspersed with the story of a mountain lion and her cubs. I thought the purpose of this was to contrast nature and civilisation; a lion mother and a human mother and how each one experiences fear, courage, instinct and the changing natural world.