Search - Charming Billy

This book was ok. There are quite a few characters in the book and at times I found myself going back a few chapters to see who exactly these people were.

I read this some time ago and found it boring. It never caught my interest, so I fell asleep.

I was very disappointed in this book. I read it because it won a National Book Award, expecting something more. She explored the surrounding characters fairly thoroughly, but at the end of the book I was left wanting for any real understanding of the character of Billy. I also found the Irish cliches a bit overdone. It was a pretty depressing book with a rather fatalistic end, but I also found the writing style poor. She is the undisputed queen of run-on sentences and it makes the reading muddled in many places. In the latter half of the book I actually laughed out loud because she had an entire paragraph spanning two pages that was literally one sentence. No kidding, a single sentence that was over 165 words long (Out of sheer incredulity I had to count) How that type of writing qualifies for winning an award is beyond me.

Really enjoyed it-- I think the author is extremely gifted.