Truth Speaker

Young adult fiction

Revisado: 03-24-25

The YAD genre is craved by many readers, nauseating to me. A witchy, Hispanic fantasy with good simple sentences and a storyline visible from the opening page.
This review will not save anyone with tastes like my own from their Bookclub choosing it. Just be warned.

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Short, no story

Revisado: 03-04-25

I bought this because Anne Tyler is a reliable good read. Not this time. She must have had a deadline and nothing in say.

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Least funny, least warm book I ever read

Revisado: 01-10-25

This book is as amusing as watching two emotionally repressed people break up silently, in a closet. I kept slogging through it because I must have seen a good review to buy it. Maybe it was a deal of the day. It did not hit the spot for “light and interesting,” not a diverting romance, and was not literary.
Must have been cheap and needed a sale price to flog it. It’s never going to sell by word of mouth
Maybe, just maybe, it will stay on the shelves as a recommendation from therapists to their emotionally constipated clients.
Word of advice to the author and/or editor: a book about a comedian needs at least one funny bit make the character believably a working performer. And only a woman with no men in her life could think this female written voice came from a male.

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The Great American Novel

Revisado: 06-02-24

Barbara Kingsolver is one of the all-time great American writers. This book may be her finest. Filled with with, interesting historic and ecological details, cultural, astuteness, and character development. I hadn’t read this book since it was first published, and remembered it well. It was even better than what I remembered.

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More an audio play than a novel

Revisado: 03-09-24

Joyce Maynard is such a gifted writer, it seems a shame to review this very thin work and consider what masterpieces she might have created in a slightly different world. The voices, long monologues really, are well distinguished and true to character as dialogue. The narration is pitch perfect. But in the end these are thin characters — I almost said caricatures — that make me sad to see this once promising author give so little to the literary world.
An enjoyable listen, missing something.

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Eminently Forgettable

Revisado: 02-12-24

Interesting topic, well written but left no trace of recollection when it was gone. Poor Reality Winner, a loser in life when her sense of proportion crosses with national security. Too bad for the young thing. Too bad for us b

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Funny and Literary

Revisado: 02-04-24

I almost never give five stars. This one earned it with a funny plot, brilliant turns of phrase, carefully plotted construction and a Goldilocks length of “just right.”
I’ve been wracking my brain to figure out who recommended this so I find I can hear what else they liked.

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A brilliant tale of the personal and public tragedy of mental illness

Revisado: 01-27-24

As a retired activist in 1980s movement for de institutionalization, I bear part of the guilt for the naivete and short sightedness of a generation of do-gooders who did bad. This book gives a personal view of one tragic take out of many, compelling references to many other whose self-advocacy revealed their struggles, and a comprehensive scholarly review of the laws, journals, public controversies and literature around the topic while remaining literate, fascinating and succinct.

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Beautiful Poetic and Boring

Revisado: 01-08-24

As a rule, I prefer a good story in my books. I also lean toward literary fiction. This book certainly has the language chops, it is almost poetic. I would compare it to Wallace Berry. That said, it has a series of overlapping, semi mystical, ghost tales that never tie together into a satisfying whole.  Without this cohesion, it winds up being a series of choppy events with no continuity of narrative in a satisfying way. Take your pick, it may have what you’re looking for, but that won’t be a distracting novel.

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Literary but depressing and a lot of work

Revisado: 12-12-23

I almost quit listening in the first section — one more coming of age saga with stupid choices. Then the narrator changed and the story got more interesting. But, in the end it was still a deeply sensitive telling of a complex plot where all the characters make interlocking, depressing, stupid choices. It is clearly a great piece of writing, which is why I finished it. But, like novels by Jonathan Franzen, the pain of appreciation may outweigh weight the pleasure of the read.

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