Note: Rachel Roellke Coddington and Jolby will present their book at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing on Wednesday, May 15, at 7:00 p.m....
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Almeda Roth, June 23, 2010 (view all comments by Almeda Roth)
A captivating, elegaic novel about family and transcience and what it means to be at home, filled with startlingly exact and illuminating moments of prose. I wore my pen out underlining sentences.
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Adrien-Alice, January 18, 2010 (view all comments by Adrien-Alice)
Oh, oh, oh. I just finished this book--it's short but potent with some of the most gorgeous prose I've read in a long time.
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bart, January 6, 2010 (view all comments by bart)
Unique and unforgettable, I find myself returning to this wonderful novel often. Such luminous prose that I gave up on my highlighter after only a few pages.
Reward yourself by reading of this book!
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WordYearner, January 1, 2010 (view all comments by WordYearner)
Oh, Marilynne Robinson. I cannot read your books; I can only eat them. I cannot imagine your characters; I must become them. My world has housekeeping; your world has housekeeping with color, taste, brooms and dust, and the haunting effects of wonderment and poetry.
Your book changed me. It took me into someone else, and then allowed me back.
I started it over and over and over; finishing it was a grief. But I am blessed with no memory to speak of, so I'll meet it again in awhile.
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"Review"
by Le Anne Schreiber, The New York Times Book Review,
"So precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn't want to miss any pleasure it might yield."
"Review"
by Anatole Broyard, The New York Times,
"Here's a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life...You can feel in the book a gathering voluptuous release of confidence, a delighted surprise at the unexpected capacities of language, a close, careful fondness for people that we thought only saints felt."
"Review"
by Doris Lessing,
"I found myself reading slowly, then more slowly — this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight."
"Review"
by Hamill, Hungry Mind Review,
"An often comic novel that has become a certifiable classic. Her name is Ruth and she has the eye and ear of a poet."
"Review"
by Charles McGrath. The New York Times Books of the Century,
"The language is so precise, so distilled and so beautiful one does not want to miss any pleasure it might yield up to patience."
"Review"
by Charles McGrath. The New York Times Books of the Century,
"....The language is so precise, so distilled and so beautiful one does not want to miss any pleasure it might yield up to patience."
"Review"
by Doris Lessing,
"I found myself reading slowly, than more slowly — this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight."
"Synopsis"
by Netread,
A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.
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