Tag Archives: American writers

#BookReview ‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson #classic #Americanwriters

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Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson had been on my shelf for a while, bought because of reputation, and anticipated. Perhaps I expected too much of a first novel because, though it has amazing reviews, I struggled to connect with the story. The writing, however, is beautiful, poetic, elegiac. Marilynne RobinsonIt is the story of Ruth and Lucille, orphans, who grow up beside a haunting lake in the vast open countryside of mid-America. The lake dominates the life of everyone who lives around it, it floods every year, and floods the house where the two girls live, first with their grandmother and then with their Aunt Sylvie. We see Sylvie’s attempts at housekeeping dwindle as the house floods each winter, as her care for the house fails, so the two girls are uncared for. Not abused, but not clean, not sent to school, not disciplined. It is a novel about the failure of housekeeping in this house, and in the family, and it is the two who girls who suffer.
The sad story moves at a slow pace, and until halfway through I had no clear picture of how the two girls were different. It is Ruth who narrates, much of which is description of the house which lays at the heart of the story.
All the description, though, is poetic. Ruth’s grandmother in her elderly years “continued to settle and began to shrink. Her mouth bowed forward and her brow sloped back, and her skull shone pink and speckled within a mere haze of hair, which hovered about her head like the remembered shape of an altered thing.”
This is not an easy read, often obscure. There was no strong thread to pull me through the book, to keep turning the pages.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

Read my reviews of Robinson’s other novels:-
GILEAD
HOME
JACK

Try the #FirstPara of GILEAD here.

If you like this, try:-
‘A Thousand Acres’ by Jane Smiley
‘Summertime’ by Vanessa Lafaye
‘Barkskins’ by Annie Proulx

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview HOUSEKEEPING by Marilynne Robinson http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1zG via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘A Spool of Blue Thread’ by Anne Tyler #contemporary

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What do you think of when you think of novelist Anne Tyler? For me, it is The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. It is quite a list. So I enjoyed the anticipation of reading her latest, A Spool of Blue Thread. What do I expect? Family, no-one writes about family like she does. Anne Tyler I became wrapped in the story of Abby and Red Whitshank and their four children Denny, Stem, Jeanie and Amanda. Abby was the character that fascinated me, we see her first as a mother in 1994 when Red takes a strange phone call from Denny who is living who knows where. They don’t know whether to believe Denny, whether to worry about him, Abby tries to empathize, Red says there is such a thing as being ‘too understanding’. And so the Whitshank story slowly unfolds like a dropped spool of blue thread running across the floor. We hear the story of Red’s father, Junior, a carpenter, who built the house Abby and Red now live in, we hear about Linnie Mae, Red’s mother and her love affair with Junie. The history of this family is in their bones, and in the bones of the house where they live. But Abby and Red are getting old now, and managing in this large house is becoming fraught with incident.
Anne Tyler dissects the structure of the family, how they become who they are, how the memories and misunderstandings from childhood and adolescence filter through to adulthood and shape mature viewpoints. And how all of this affects the Whitshanks’ relationships with each other, and the outside world.

Read my reviews of these other books by Anne Tyler:-
CLOCK DANCE
FRENCH BRAID
LADDER OF YEARS
REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD
VINEGAR GIRL

And read the first paragraphs of:-
DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT 
BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWN UPS 

If you like this, try:-
‘A Thousand Acres’ by Jane Smiley
‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson
‘My Name is Lucy Barton’ by Elizabeth Strout

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview A SPOOL OF BLUE THREAD by Anne Tyler via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1xH

Great opening paragraph 3… ‘Herzog’ #amreading #FirstPara

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“If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.”
Saul Bellow From ‘Herzog’ by Saul Bellow

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Enduring Love’ by Ian McKewan
‘Lord of the Flies’ by William Golding
‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’ by Rachel Joyce

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara HERZOG by Saul Bellow http://wp.me/p5gEM4-4G via @SandraDanby