Blue sky, green trees.

Wow, I did not see this book coming. It was our July book club selection, and while I was perfectly happy to read it I didn't have very high expectations. I figured it would be slice-of-life, heavy on descriptions and short on action, and the start of the book bore this out. However, things take an unexpected turn and the pace really picks up. Then it picks up even more, and keeps on going. I have to dock it half a star because there were still lots of overly-long descriptions, whole pages-worth of descriptions, that I had to skim/skip to keep in the flow. Otherwise a damn fine book.

Hell of a good book. The sleeping around and divorce aspects were surprising because I had always been taught that up until the boomer generation it was deeply shameful to be divorced or to sleep around, and that there were serious social consequences for it. This book is another indication, among many, that this is simply not the case. Interesting, entertaining. Highly recommend.

I was disappointed in this book. The writing felt so amateurish and unpolished, like a collection of stream of conscious notes that were in the process of being turned into a first draft. He repeated points over and over within paragraphs as well as throughout the book, over-explaining and in the process killing the vitality of the ideas. Also, there was the big problem that the book didn't make any point - it felt like listening to a very detailed and long-winded description of a mildly interesting person's day.

I'm feeling and thinking lots of complicated things right now because of this book. Happiness and discomfort and regret and pride are a few. Some sections lit a fire under me to be a catalyst for change, and some sections made me feel like a helpless fuck-up. Mostly it made very clear that how I feel isn't the point, that POC & LGBTQ & QPOC's feelings are the point because theirs are the lives at stake. And that knowing these two things is not the goal line but the starting line.

Only three potentially useful suggestions from the whole book. Also, over 130 pages devoted to the mobile version of common websites, which is less than helpful since everybody knows major sites have mobile versions, and if you go to a site in your cellphone's browser it will direct you to download their app. Not a useful book, I do not recommend.

A solid 3.5 star book, which could easily have been a 4+ star book with some tweaks to the writing. And by some tweaks I mean an editor should have sat down and slashed all of the self-conscious and second-guessing asides, and 99% of the qualifiers as well. A little doubt among characters is fine, but the inability of the main characters to make a definite, unqualified sentence was off-putting and distracting. It was too “look at me looking at myself”, which inevitably pulled me out of the story and, indeed, made me look at it. Examples:

“She always felt vaguely as if she ought to be draped in lace and ruffles, or possibly diaphanous peignoirs, whatever they were, in order to live up to the surroundings;” (emphasis in original) - why insert the phrase “whatever they were”, what does this aside add to the story? My suspicion is that the author believes a protagonist who knows about peignoirs will somehow alienate readers, and that the aside is meant to keep Greta “relatable”. Bad writing. Use the word with confidence or just scrap it altogether.

“She would not be the eleventh, if she had any say in the matter” (emphasis in original). This sentence is during a particularly dramatic scene, and comes at the pivotal moment in the action where Greta decides to fight for her life. Why, WHY is this moment diluted by the addition of “if she had any say in the matter”?! If someone has decided to fight off an attacker she is not going to be thinking about how much say she has in the matter, she is going to be thinking of how to survive. I think the author added this aside to show us how plucky our heroine is, but instead it creates a look-at-me-looking-at-myself moment that rings false and takes us right out of the action.

And so on and so forth throughout the book. Again, a good editor would have slashed out all the hedging and left us with a lean story that really zings along, but since that didn't happen we have to ask if the fantastic plot and characters outweigh the weak writing. For me, they did. As I moved through the book I became completely engrossed in the story, hedging asides and all, and I couldn't wait to find out what would happen next. Overall, a good read.

Solid book. Sometimes it was so dense with useful and interesting information that my brain would overload and I'd lose the thread of the story. I found it really helpful to have my computer nearby so I could look up images of the artifacts and videos of some of the activities, especially spinning and weaving - her descriptions are good but I just could not visualize wtf she was talking about when things got whorly and wefty.

There is just too much in this book, and also I think a bit too little. Let's start with the too much.

The writing style suffers from an abundance of the narrator's meandering thoughts and conjectures. Like most people the narrator (Lucy) has numerous false starts before she says (or doesn't say) something, but here we are given free access to these stumbles; way too much information. Furthermore, Lucy spins out endless scenarios of what other characters may be doing, which bogs down the flow because the author never does anything with these thoughts, just lets them pile up. A character's conjecturing is like highlights in your hair - best when used sparingly and with careful placement, otherwise it's a hot mess.

And speaking of meandering conjectures, Lucy does a lot - A LOT - of this about herself. And here it would generally work because she is on the run, and imaging the outcomes of various actions is logical. But here's where the too much starts to overlap with the too little: we have pages and pages and pages devoted to Lucy's meandering conjectures about what she could do, but she barely does anything at all! She just keeps driving, and aside from stops in Chicago and Pittsburgh this driving is completely aimless. The contrast between her overabundant imaginings and her complete lack of action is perhaps intentional, but it does not make for good reading.So Lucy's inaction brings us to the heart of the too little portion. Lucy AT NO POINT asks Ian why he is running away! They are together a week, most of that time alone in a car, and she never asks him! She assumes she knows why, but even so a real person would still ask a child for an explanation, would try to talk about it again and again until there was some clarity. It makes no sense at all, and when I realized that she was never going to ask him about his reasons, well, for me the book shattered.There were some bright spots in the book, to be sure. First, I really liked the idea that a kid can force an adult into uncomfortable/dangerous/illegal actions and situations by threatening to lie about the adult to authorities. Kids actually have a lot of power over adults, and this explored that dynamic in an interesting way. Second, I liked the literary allusions and poems the author sprinkles throughout; they were fun and made me smile. Third, I liked that the author took on the damaging (and illegal) practice of " reprogramming" gay and lesbian people to become heterosexual. She does a pretty good job of creating a fun, interesting, smart, happy child whose parents are trying to break him to fit into a specific mold that matches their religion, and to show what can be lost if they succeed. I LOVE that she specifically talks about how the Bible's prohibition against homosexuality is in the same sentence as a prohibition against eating shellfish, which is in itself sandwiched among rules about menstruation and crop rotation, and all the latter are freely ignored in modern Western society while the former is used to justify every conceivable physical and psychological torture. We need more contemporary, popular novels that unmask this dangerous hypocrisy, although hopefully better written.

I found the writing to be a little stilted, which was a surprise. The movie felt, in a word, lyrical, and I expected that a lot of that came from the book but nope, not the case. I had picked up this book because I wanted the feel of the movie, and also because I felt like, for all the lyricalness of it, the movie had some gaps; I thought that the book would fill those. I think that the book did a good job of telling us about Eilish and her immigrant experience, but it was very much telling from a remove, not inviting us in to feel it with her.

I was very surprised at how clearly the book showed that she only went back to Brooklyn because she was caught out in her deception, and that if she had been able to get away with it she would have somehow stayed and married Jim. In the movie I remember it being much more "I left Ireland because of catty bitches like you!", and Eilish feeling glad to leave. Much more ambiguity, which was interesting.

The biggest question throughout the book is, “How can they afford this?”, where the word this stands for not only the large project of restoring Gwydir Castle, but for the 10,000+ small projects that make up that restoration. It is stated clearly at the start of the book that they absolutely cannot afford this property, but with some vague talk of a mother's bargaining skills and a loan they somehow pull it off. Likewise, they continually talk about these endless projects - new roofs, new walls, repairs along every square inch - and yet they only sporadically have jobs and for most of the book do not take in paying guests. I would love to see some of the prices for the restoration and the furniture they buy to go along with it; the closest we get is learning that during a bidding war for a chair at an auction they had to back out when the number crested five digits.

This question of money is the part that required the most suspension of disbelief for me, and that is saying a lot considering that we have a ghost story to deal with partway through. But if you can get past all that, it is a fantastic book of falling passionately in love with a particular place and time. The author's description of how the castle makes her feel connected to the past in a visceral, immediate, shock-and-awe way rings true for me because I've felt that twice in my life and have chased it ever since. It is a delight to read about two people whose interests run not broad but deep, very deep, into one particular time and place, and their happiness and satisfaction with their choices swept me along.

Die Geschichte nervt mich. Der Fremder steigt um Mitternacht das Haus ein, ohne Einladung? Wer macht das? Unsinnig. Er sieht eine Leiche, aber Moment, auch eine sexy Frau! Statt die Polizei zu rufen, will er sich mit ihr unterhalten. Unsinnig! Dann entschließt er sich mit dem Mord zu verwickeln, ein Mord zwischen Fremden, der nichts mit ihm zu tun hat:

“Ich mache mich nachträglich zum Komplizen,” antwortete er.
“Aber warum?”, fragte Laura. “Warum?”
“Wohl aus dem einfachen Grund, weil Sie eine überaus attraktive Frau sind und mir der Gedanke nicht gefällt, dass Sie die besten Jahre Ihres Lebens hinter Gittern verbringen sollen.”

Quatsch.

I just couldn't get into them. Some were familiar, and that was sweet, while others were new and therefore mildly interesting. But I never felt like reading them, even as a little something short and easy before bed. The book itself I'll keep, it's gorgeous and very high quality, and who knows when it might be needed as a reference.

I liked the book a lot, however there were two problems that I had with it: First, the skipping back and forth in time was sometimes confusing. I understand that that's often how life feels, that as you go through something you look back and say, “Oh, the seeds of this were actually planted years ago, how did I not notice them growing quietly into this thing?” All the same, it sometimes left me confused about when exactly these events took place, or how much time had elapsed between events (often, much more than I realized). More clarity on that front would have helped me.

Second, there was very little clarity about what was going on when the author moved from a hetero identity to a lesbian identity. We have the author living a cis female life in a hetero marriage, and then the author is at a lesbian bowling event and falling in love with a woman. I mean, why was the author there? Was there already self-recognition of their lesbianism, was this a hetero-married cis woman invading an LGBTQ space for shits and giggles, or was this somehow research for the series that the author was writing? It is not clear. After this section the author explains that since their parent came out as trans, their own problems with being femme and female had started to bubble up, but what does that mean? It's a toss-away, an interesting aside that I think is supposed to explain but fails. This issue of the author's move from identifying as straight to identifying as gay is simultaneously a small thing and a big thing. Small because the rest of the book still made sense and was good to read, but big because this is a beat change, a moment after which all becomes different, and it's not fully clear to the reader how we got here.

A final note: this book talks very little about the author's parent who is trans. To be fair this book is not her story, it's the author's story.

I had to stop reading this while eating because the stress was giving me stomach cramps. The author's writing is so vivid, so compelling, and the story is truly horrifying. In the Prologue the author explains that he wrote the book so soon after the disaster in part to help himself process everything that took place up there, and I could really feel that come through in his writing (this is not a criticism, it is a compliment). Grappling with the choices everyone made, how people's flaws or prejudices or bravery or tenacity played a role, would absolutely require some heavy-duty processing for a survivor, and it makes for fascinating reading. Highly, highly recommend.