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A review by mohginreads
Small World by Laura Zigman
3.0
⭐️ finished: 2/4/23
⭐️ rating: 5/10
⭐️ takeaway: Two sisters in their fifties move in together in the wake of their divorces. The narrator (Joyce) hopes this will be her chance for closeness with Lydia that they never had during childhood, which they both spent in the long shadow of their deceased middle sister’s severe disability and early death. When being at close quarters with Lydia, the arrival of new and extremely noisy upstairs neighbors, and the barrage of “dangerous” memories Joyce encounters through her work as a digital archivist all becomes too much, Joyce reformats posts from her neighborhood message board app, Small World, into poems in spare notebooks. Overall, nothing really happens plot wise, and the characters finish with minimal emotional advancements. There is no acceleration or resolution to any of the tension, and the characters are quirky but only in an unsettling way, not in an interesting way. I considered DNFing this several times, but I kept expecting it to pick up.
⭐️ rating: 5/10
⭐️ takeaway: Two sisters in their fifties move in together in the wake of their divorces. The narrator (Joyce) hopes this will be her chance for closeness with Lydia that they never had during childhood, which they both spent in the long shadow of their deceased middle sister’s severe disability and early death. When being at close quarters with Lydia, the arrival of new and extremely noisy upstairs neighbors, and the barrage of “dangerous” memories Joyce encounters through her work as a digital archivist all becomes too much, Joyce reformats posts from her neighborhood message board app, Small World, into poems in spare notebooks. Overall, nothing really happens plot wise, and the characters finish with minimal emotional advancements. There is no acceleration or resolution to any of the tension, and the characters are quirky but only in an unsettling way, not in an interesting way. I considered DNFing this several times, but I kept expecting it to pick up.