APRIL 2014

Blindness ~ Jose Saramago

** OK **

Norwegian By Night ~ Derek B. Miller

** OK **

The Leftovers ~ Tom Perrotta

*** LIKE ***

Family Life ~ Akhil Sharma

X NO X

One brother is catatonic, the other is mundane
The plot is both

Fine to have the voice of a young, then teenage narrator, bu the voice doesn't change as the narrator gets older.  And I deliberately didn't use the word "matures" because he doesn't seem to mature at all.

I am still not sure why this was a recommended read ... he must have credentials or connections.  There was no plot.  There was an enormous amount of trivial repetition.  Boring as!  Get. Over. Yourself.

Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant ~ Anne Tyler

** OK **

Eerky not quirky
About as satisfying as Maccas

Frog Music ~ Emma Donoghue

X NO X 

This book croaked!
The narrative and characters were dead, dead, dead.

Should I just check the thesaurus for synonyms for "tedious" because I might overuse the word in my review? (Actually I am afraid that if I  looked up "tedious" I would probably see "Frog Music"!!)

If only I had checked and seen the rather long appendix.  It made far more interesting reading that the drivel presented as fictionalised history ... but sadly by then I had more than lost interested in it all. 

If only women dressing as men, or burlesque dancers engaging in raunchy sex made up for a boring storyline.  And making that storyline chronologically fractured did nothing to add to the mess.  Either did the insipid snippets of song lyrics.  Or the blathering conversations.

I love San Francisco and I love a a book with a strong sense of place.  Possibly the problem here was that it was so try-hard ... it tried hard to get in so much history that it seemed like a cut-and-paste from research notes, just point-form trivia. The feeling was missing : the feeling of being there, feelings for the welfare of the characters.

The Enchanted ~ Rene Denfeld

***** FAVOURITE *****

Brutally touching
Resonant