A week and a half into the school year and I already feel overscheduled. 101 days until Christmas.
Cruel Beautiful World was one of those books that was very good, until it wasn’t. It just seemed like she didn’t know when to stop or something. At some point in writing school they must teach that the denouement shouldn’t be 150 pages, right? I’d still recommend this, because I was pretty hooked. I’ve also realized that if you put the Manson family in your novel, I am definitely going to read it.
I was really looking forward to The Resurrection of Joan Ashby. Fiction about how marriage and family affect a woman’s career and overall sense of self is right up my alley, and I’m not scared off by giant books. The main character is a writer, and there are a lot of excerpts of her work throughout, which I loved, for the most part. But this book has a lot of problems, number one being that it is greatly in need of some editing. This just goes on and on and on and fucking on; someone was in love with the writing here and that somebody was not me. There were a lot of plot points that didn’t completely make sense, and the main character goes too deep into martyr mode to elicit any sympathy from the reader. I mean, if you get pregnant by accident and you want to terminate, but your husband says, “I’m so happy,” maybe have a little bit more of a conversation about it before you just have the baby and spend the next 30 years simmering with resentment. Just a thought. This might have worked better if it were set in an earlier time period, but I could just never get on board with Joan and her predicament here.
Genuine Fraud was a huge relief after that tedious book. This is a gender swapped Talented Mr Ripley, told backwards, Memento-style. Does that sound awesome to you? It does to me! It did not disappoint. This was great, and my friend went to high school with the author and she has nothing but good things to say about her, so what else is there to say?
Right now I’m about halfway through A Piece of the World. I never feel especially drawn to historical fiction but I always end up loving it. This is a novel based on Christina of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. This is pretty perfect for me right now, good writing, good story, and it’s moving pretty fast…which is good because my to-read stack is out of control. Signing off to get back to it!
