Overall, I enjoyed this novel about a young woman on the run in the Canadian wilderness, ca. 1903. Never quite fitting into the accepted role for women of her day, the heroine, Mary Boulton, comes into her own, finding strengths and desires that she never knew she had as she flees from the avenging brothers of the husband she murdered. Along the way, she meets a series of fascinating characters. The Outlander is not quite a western and certainly not a murder mystery; it's more of a wilderness adventure and the story of a woman discovering herself.
Adamson, also a poet, has the ability to put us inside her heroine's mind, and her descriptions are vivid and highly sensory. My only quibble is that I wish she hadn't continued to call Mary "the widow" throughout the entire novel. We get the irony; if you give your character a name, use it! (Especially when "the widow" is not how Mary would identify herself, nor does anyone else label her "the widow" once she changes from her mourning weeds, which happens early in the novel.)
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What a sad, hopeful, horrific, and beautiful book. Yes, I know there seem to be a lot of contradictions in that sentence, but that is exactly how Galloway presents the experience of living (or maybe just surviving) in a once-great city under siege. The frame of the novel is based on a real story of a cellist who plays Albinoni's Adagio on the site where twenty-two people waiting in line for bread were killed by a mortar attack. He has vowed to play every day for twenty-two days in their honor. He never explains his reason for putting himself in the line of sniper fire, nor do the people who stand listening to him. (In fact, he is more of a peripheral character.) But it's clear that they are trying to hold on to some last scraps of decency and civilization in a city where they have to walk for miles just to get water, risking being shot by snipers at every intersection, and where dead bodies lying in the street are such a common sight that everyone just steps over them. The book made me think about the little things that we take for granted every day, and of the fragility of life and the pointlessness of war. An absolutely stunning novel. Highly recommended.
I was up until 3 a.m. last night finishing this novel; I just couldn't sleep without knowing how it ended. It is definitely one of my best reads so far this year. Goolrick creates two intriguing and believable characters in Ralph and Catherine, the northern Wisconsin mogul and his mail-order wife, and he is especially adept at giving them interior lives. Although they initially seem like opposites, we soon learn that they share pasts flawed by misplaced love, tragedy, and self-loathing. Goolrick so successsfully sets forth these characters and their stories that the novel's twists and turns, while often unexpected, never seem unbelievable. The spareness of his style is a perfect complement to the empty white landscape of the Wisconsin winter and to the empty lives of Ralph, Catherine, and Antonio. But don't let this fool you: A Reliable Wife is hauntingly, lyrically beautiful as well. And beneath both the landscape and the seemingly empty lives lies the promise and dread of something more.
I was so affected by this novel that I probably won't be picking up anything new to read for a day or two. I'm just not ready to leave it yet.
This book does exactly what the author must have intended: it alerts its audience to a shocking world that we generally know little of, the world of child prostitution. The novel is purportedly "written" by 15-year old Batuk, who was sold into prostitution by her father at the age of nine. The one delight in her life is her ability to read and write, which she learned as a TB patient at a missionary hospital. Batuk records the memories of her life back home in an Indian farming village as well as the horrific details of her life over the past six years. Levine's story is the story of many children with whom he has come in contact in the course of his work, and it is particularly affecting because we see what promise this child, in a different environment, might have fulfilled. The voice he creates for Batuk is believable, never self-pitying, always pragmatic. And that makes the novel all the more hauntingly sad. I found myself unable to put this one down and unable to forget it once I had finished it.
It was hard to know just what to expect of this book. It's one of those that tells you on the jacket that you are in for a lot of surprises, we don't want to spoil it by telling you much, and please don't give anything away. For the life of me, I'm not sure I understand why there needed to be all this mystery. It's the story of a young Nigerian woman who, at the beginning of the novel, has been "unofficially" released from a detention center in England. Among her few belongings are the driver's license and business card of Andrew Rourke, a reporter that she tells us she had met on a beach in Nigeria several years earlier. She makes her way to his home, and the story becomes one told alternately by Little Bee and Rourke's wife, Sarah.
So I won't really give away any more. We learn what has happened to Little Bee in Nigeria, how Sarah and her husband first came to be involved with her, and how Little Bee becomes a part of the llife of Sarah and her four-year old son, Charlie (otherwise known as Batman for the costume he literally lives in). And it becomes, in the end, a story of redemption, sacrifice, and understanding. Cleave has a charmingly lyrical style that particularly suits his central character.
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cariola119 has commented on (27) products.
The Outlander (P.S.) by Gil Adamson
cariola119, November 29, 2009
Overall, I enjoyed this novel about a young woman on the run in the Canadian wilderness, ca. 1903. Never quite fitting into the accepted role for women of her day, the heroine, Mary Boulton, comes into her own, finding strengths and desires that she never knew she had as she flees from the avenging brothers of the husband she murdered. Along the way, she meets a series of fascinating characters. The Outlander is not quite a western and certainly not a murder mystery; it's more of a wilderness adventure and the story of a woman discovering herself.Adamson, also a poet, has the ability to put us inside her heroine's mind, and her descriptions are vivid and highly sensory. My only quibble is that I wish she hadn't continued to call Mary "the widow" throughout the entire novel. We get the irony; if you give your character a name, use it! (Especially when "the widow" is not how Mary would identify herself, nor does anyone else label her "the widow" once she changes from her mourning weeds, which happens early in the novel.)
(2 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
cariola119, November 29, 2009
What a sad, hopeful, horrific, and beautiful book. Yes, I know there seem to be a lot of contradictions in that sentence, but that is exactly how Galloway presents the experience of living (or maybe just surviving) in a once-great city under siege. The frame of the novel is based on a real story of a cellist who plays Albinoni's Adagio on the site where twenty-two people waiting in line for bread were killed by a mortar attack. He has vowed to play every day for twenty-two days in their honor. He never explains his reason for putting himself in the line of sniper fire, nor do the people who stand listening to him. (In fact, he is more of a peripheral character.) But it's clear that they are trying to hold on to some last scraps of decency and civilization in a city where they have to walk for miles just to get water, risking being shot by snipers at every intersection, and where dead bodies lying in the street are such a common sight that everyone just steps over them. The book made me think about the little things that we take for granted every day, and of the fragility of life and the pointlessness of war. An absolutely stunning novel. Highly recommended.A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
cariola119, November 29, 2009
I was up until 3 a.m. last night finishing this novel; I just couldn't sleep without knowing how it ended. It is definitely one of my best reads so far this year. Goolrick creates two intriguing and believable characters in Ralph and Catherine, the northern Wisconsin mogul and his mail-order wife, and he is especially adept at giving them interior lives. Although they initially seem like opposites, we soon learn that they share pasts flawed by misplaced love, tragedy, and self-loathing. Goolrick so successsfully sets forth these characters and their stories that the novel's twists and turns, while often unexpected, never seem unbelievable. The spareness of his style is a perfect complement to the empty white landscape of the Wisconsin winter and to the empty lives of Ralph, Catherine, and Antonio. But don't let this fool you: A Reliable Wife is hauntingly, lyrically beautiful as well. And beneath both the landscape and the seemingly empty lives lies the promise and dread of something more.I was so affected by this novel that I probably won't be picking up anything new to read for a day or two. I'm just not ready to leave it yet.
The Blue Notebook by James Levine
cariola119, November 29, 2009
This book does exactly what the author must have intended: it alerts its audience to a shocking world that we generally know little of, the world of child prostitution. The novel is purportedly "written" by 15-year old Batuk, who was sold into prostitution by her father at the age of nine. The one delight in her life is her ability to read and write, which she learned as a TB patient at a missionary hospital. Batuk records the memories of her life back home in an Indian farming village as well as the horrific details of her life over the past six years. Levine's story is the story of many children with whom he has come in contact in the course of his work, and it is particularly affecting because we see what promise this child, in a different environment, might have fulfilled. The voice he creates for Batuk is believable, never self-pitying, always pragmatic. And that makes the novel all the more hauntingly sad. I found myself unable to put this one down and unable to forget it once I had finished it.Little Bee by Chris Cleave
cariola119, November 29, 2009
It was hard to know just what to expect of this book. It's one of those that tells you on the jacket that you are in for a lot of surprises, we don't want to spoil it by telling you much, and please don't give anything away. For the life of me, I'm not sure I understand why there needed to be all this mystery. It's the story of a young Nigerian woman who, at the beginning of the novel, has been "unofficially" released from a detention center in England. Among her few belongings are the driver's license and business card of Andrew Rourke, a reporter that she tells us she had met on a beach in Nigeria several years earlier. She makes her way to his home, and the story becomes one told alternately by Little Bee and Rourke's wife, Sarah.So I won't really give away any more. We learn what has happened to Little Bee in Nigeria, how Sarah and her husband first came to be involved with her, and how Little Bee becomes a part of the llife of Sarah and her four-year old son, Charlie (otherwise known as Batman for the costume he literally lives in). And it becomes, in the end, a story of redemption, sacrifice, and understanding. Cleave has a charmingly lyrical style that particularly suits his central character.
(1 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)
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