Ivy

Perfect!

Revisado: 11-19-24

What a luminous, gorgeous, affirming novella. I am so grateful to have read it. Just perfect. Should be a Christmas classic.

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Masterpiece

Revisado: 09-19-24

Very few books are so enthralling and brilliantly conceived that I actually slow down before I reach the finish because I so dread being done with it. This was one of those books. It will long linger in my mind.

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Perfect novel, perfect narration

Revisado: 03-03-23

What an absolute delight this novel is. Beautifully told, plotted with taut precision, funny, moving, sad, satisfying, nuanced. The world Dickens created is so vivid and complex, the characters so fully realized, that I hated for it to end. I miss Pip! And my goodness, Simon Prebble is a brilliant narrator. He captured so many distinct voices, and told the tale in a spellbinding way. What a delightful listening experience this was.

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The author thinks animal abuse is hilarious

Revisado: 09-16-22

It's hard to express how offended I am by this book. It is replete with stories of horrifically abused and killed animals. While in some memoirs, such stories are clearly important to the author's growth (the wrenching death of the beloved horse Lady in Cheryl Strayed's "Wild," for example), in this book, a near-constant stream of stories about the unspeakably horrifying deaths and abuse of animals serves no real narrative purpose. Most disturbingly, the author often tells the stories for laughs. We are supposed to laugh along with her about the expression on the face of a drowned pet; the pitching of a beloved pig out to be ripped up by dogs; the nightmare of a poor raccoon brought by her father to be terrorized by dozens of crazed dogs for an entire night.

With that one, I was done. There is something twisted and wrong about this author, and I have no desire to read anything more by her. If you care at all about animals, avoid this book.

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Great story, great research, unfortunate title

Revisado: 07-08-22

The story of two astoundingly brave sisters who risked their lives to work for the Dutch underground and create a refuge for hunted Jews in Nazi-occupied Holland, The Sisters of Auschwitz is an excellent book. Van Iperen does a beautiful job of integrating the larger picture -- the war, the Final Solution, the situation in the Netherlands -- with the intimate and breathtakingly dramatic details of these sisters' journey through the war. I am a historian of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, and I can attest to the accuracy of the meticulously researched presentation of the war in Holland and the ghastly situation for Jewish people.

In its original Dutch form, this book was called The High Nest, and it is terribly unfortunate that the English language publisher chose to retitle it as it did, because it gives away the most dramatic turn of the story, the capture and concentration camp imprisonment of the sisters. It also downplays the beating heart of the book, the sisters' transformation of a forest cottage (the "High Nest") into a shelter for Jews and an ingenious matrix of resistance activity, right in the middle of a Nazi stronghold. This retitling is likely no fault of the author, and even with the spoiling of that terrible surprise, the book is still well worth reading.

One little note for audio readers. Auschwitz is correctly pronounced Owsh-Vetz. The narrator consistently pronounces it Osh-Witch, an error that is glaring and irritating.

Brava to Roxane van Iperen for unearthing, preserving, and recounting one of the most inspiring stories of World War II.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Perfection

Revisado: 05-22-22

There isn’t one word in this book that falls short of perfection. Lovely and unforgettable.

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Oppressively gloomy, lacks resolution

Revisado: 05-05-22

There are some things in this book that Sally Rooney captures beautifully. The small gestures of people, their intimate and singular thoughts, the struggle of feeling like an outsider, the ways in which shame is manifested.

But overall, this book didn’t work for me. It is desperately gloomy, populated with two lonely, glum people. The ancillary characters are sketched so faintly that you barely know anything at all about them. It is if these two central characters are falling through mist, with little context. There is no tangible world around them.

I found it initially fairly engaging, but as it went on, with the unhappy protagonists warily coming together and snapping apart over and over without being able to articulate or even understand why, I began to weary of it, and it’s oppressive bleakness. Ultimately, there is no resolution to their unhappy cycle. And one aspect of the way in which their relationship is left is sickening to me.

While there were threads of good things in this book, I didn’t feel they were woven together into a garment that was in any way involving. I just felt downcast by it. I'm sorry I gave it so much time.

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A huge miss for the brilliant Wharton

Revisado: 04-29-22

Edith Wharton was an incandescent talent, easily as great as Hemingway, Morrison, and Fitzgerald. After having read, and re-read, what I thought were all of her marvelous novels, I was delighted to discover this one, which I'd never heard of. Alas, it was a major disappointment, and a surprising one. Wharton is normally so surefooted when crafting stories and characters, but I could not find anything engaging in it. There is a sameness to the dialogue of each of her characters, all of whom seem to start their sentences with "Oh!" The central character's struggle with his envy of his son's beloved stepfather becomes tiresome very quickly. The arc of the story is predictable and dull, and is so uneventful that it's more of a flat line than an arc. While I am normally deeply absorbed in her novels, in this one I found myself completely disinterested in the inner worlds of these people, and so little happens in this book that you need connection to the characters to sustain you as a reader. It didn't feel like a Wharton novel in any way. I still feel surprised when I see her name as the author.

Richard Poe may be a wonderful narrator for other subjects, but this was not a good fit for him. The voices he gives to the women are consistently overwrought and tremulous, which becomes annoying, and seems to diverge from the author's intentions. He gives the men big, bombastic voices, or little pipsqueak voices. It just doesn't work.

By all means, read Wharton. Just not this one.

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Magnificent concept ruined by vague writing

Revisado: 04-29-22

This is unquestionably the most frustrating book I've ever read. The concept is overspilling with promise; a man tries to woo a doomed heiress so he can inherit her money and marry the poor, socially leveraged woman he loves, only to fall for the heiress. But James' disastrous execution of his marvelous idea destroys it. As many reviewers have noted, his writing is so endlessly vague, so self-consciously lofty at the cost of clarity, that one has to listen to sentences over and over in a usually fruitless attempt to understand what he's trying to say. Often, it seems he doesn't want us to know. (And my goodness, can't he call a conversing person a person, rather than an "interlocutor," which he seems to do one hundred times in this novel?) He has very, very little dialogue or action, preferring to spend hundreds of pages telling us what his characters are thinking, rather than showing it in word and deed, and he's enamored of summarizing scenes rather than letting us witness them, which makes it impossible to become involved or absorbed. It's as if he is telling us about a novel he read, rather than actually writing the novel. Even the incandescently talented narrator Juliet Stevenson can't save James here.

There is so much potential in this story, and James, when he's on his game (the masterpiece Portrait of a Lady), is almost peerless in his ability to see inside his characters and their complicated worlds. But in this book, all this promise is wasted in his inexplicably murky writing and summarizing. I've never felt so frustrated with a book or author.

Edith Wharton was James' friend, and the two addressed the same themes in their books -- the plight of marginalized, exploited, trapped women in the late 1800s-early 1900s. Each was wondrously insightful and sympathetic to their characters. But Wharton was vastly, vastly more capable of realizing the promise in her stories, crafting her narrative worlds in prose of shimmering, austere clarity. If James frustrates you as he does me, try Wharton, most notably "Summer," "Custom of the Country," and "The Age of Innocence." I wish she had tried her hand at this story.

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Shining perfection

Revisado: 04-29-22

Edith Wharton stands alongside Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, and the rest of the greatest American writers. I have read, I believe, every one of her novels, several of them multiple times. This one she regarded as her finest. The realization of the central character and her ancillaries is breathtaking, the writing is shimmeringly elegant, austere, and precise, and the story is as arresting, involving, and shocking today as it must’ve been in 1916. Grace Conlin delivers a narrative performance equal to the brilliance of her subject. This audiobook is perfection.

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