Catherine C. (c-squared) reviewed The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family on + 181 more book reviews
So here's my issue with too many memoirs:
I make photo books on photography websites for my kids, since I'm not patient or crafty enough to scrapbook. I go through all the pictures I took of them over the course of a year or two and try to cram all the best ones into forty or so pages. Inevitably, I end up with 80 or 100 pages on the first go and have to ruthlessly cull all those pictures down to a manageable number. I imagine it must be similar to write a memoir. You want to include everything important, but after it's all down on the page, no one really wants to see four pictures of your toddler's face smeared with yogurt.
And this is my repeated complaint with memoirs. Instead of leaving me wanting more, I usually think, "Enough, already!" Maybe I should avoid memoirs as a general rule, but I always come across interesting lives that I want to read about...and then it becomes too much.
So this one -- the story of a couple who dreamed of being self-sufficient blueberry farmers/ homesteaders -- seemed to have a lot of promise, but got bogged down in the details. It doesn't help that the author is a professor/poet. (I found the poetic excerpts at the beginning of each section a tad painful.) Too many customers described, too many mundane details of their lives, just a little too much in general. And many of the chapters felt disconnected, like they were written as blog entries, or more likely in this case, newspaper columns, and then strung together, with information repeated or out of chronological order. I think I would have enjoyed the book more if it had lost 1/3 to 1/2 of its 300 pages in the editing process. (I fully admit that I skimmed or skipped most of his "blue interludes.")
I make photo books on photography websites for my kids, since I'm not patient or crafty enough to scrapbook. I go through all the pictures I took of them over the course of a year or two and try to cram all the best ones into forty or so pages. Inevitably, I end up with 80 or 100 pages on the first go and have to ruthlessly cull all those pictures down to a manageable number. I imagine it must be similar to write a memoir. You want to include everything important, but after it's all down on the page, no one really wants to see four pictures of your toddler's face smeared with yogurt.
And this is my repeated complaint with memoirs. Instead of leaving me wanting more, I usually think, "Enough, already!" Maybe I should avoid memoirs as a general rule, but I always come across interesting lives that I want to read about...and then it becomes too much.
So this one -- the story of a couple who dreamed of being self-sufficient blueberry farmers/ homesteaders -- seemed to have a lot of promise, but got bogged down in the details. It doesn't help that the author is a professor/poet. (I found the poetic excerpts at the beginning of each section a tad painful.) Too many customers described, too many mundane details of their lives, just a little too much in general. And many of the chapters felt disconnected, like they were written as blog entries, or more likely in this case, newspaper columns, and then strung together, with information repeated or out of chronological order. I think I would have enjoyed the book more if it had lost 1/3 to 1/2 of its 300 pages in the editing process. (I fully admit that I skimmed or skipped most of his "blue interludes.")
