Helpful Score: 4
I just finished reading My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout in one sitting. This book reads like a play, with each short chapter creating a scene. From these snapshots emerges the picture of a life Lucy Barton's life. The power of this book lies in the fact that its emotions feel so real, and the story feels so genuine that it leaves me thinking that it is more than fiction.
Read my complete review at: http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2015/12/my-name-is-lucy-barton.html
Reviewed based on a copy received through a publisher's giveaway. Thank you Shelf Awareness.
Read my complete review at: http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2015/12/my-name-is-lucy-barton.html
Reviewed based on a copy received through a publisher's giveaway. Thank you Shelf Awareness.
Helpful Score: 2
When Lucy Barton is in a hospital following an appendectomy with an unexplained disease her husband, William, pays for her estranged mother to fly to NYC from Illinois to be with her. What follows is an exploration of the family history and a renewal of the mother-daughter bond. Lucy's family led a hardscrabble existence with an emotionally distant mother and an abusive father. Now a published author of fiction, Lucy is able to gain an added perspective during her conversations with her mother of everything that shaped her life and her writing. There are painful, poignant memories and there are reminiscences that evoke humor.
This is a powerfully haunting book about the effects of childhood on adult choices. It is told with a compassionate understanding that is present in all of Elizabeth Strout's books.
This is a powerfully haunting book about the effects of childhood on adult choices. It is told with a compassionate understanding that is present in all of Elizabeth Strout's books.
Sandi K W. (Sandiinmississippi) reviewed My Name Is Lucy Barton (Amgash, Bk 1) on + 265 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
A dreadful, one-note, mishmash which appears to be collected scraps she wrote while stranded in a back bathroom. Lucy Barton was raised in a rural, low-income, non-intellectual family, thus she can only communicate in two-syllable words at most and short sentences. Lots of very short. Sentences. On and On. Her troubled relationship with her mother (also a short sentence gal) is not explored but hinted at - because you know lower class people are very subtle. This is one of the most pretentious pieces of scribble I've encountered.
This is the second time that this slim volume has defeated me. You would think it wouldn't be hard to complete a novel of less than 200 pages, with many "chapters" that are less than one full page. You would think. But for a week now, this book has been sitting by my Reading Chair (I have a Reading Chair ....) sucking all the joy out of my life, so I think its time to do myself a favor, and kick it to the curb. That is not a metaphor ...
This is HARD, because a number of people who I love and respect, love this book. My first attempt to read it was when I was with my last Book Group, and the consensus was -- they loved it. Echos of the blurb by Hilary Mantel ( ... oh, Hilary, no, not you too!! ...) on the cover of my edition: "Writing of this quality comes from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue."
Obviously, I don't feel that way. IMHO, writing of this quality is about as real as a wooden nickel. The central character is whiny and smug. The mother who visits her at her hospital bedside seems to bear no relationship to the mother she recalls from her abusive childhood. Her relationship with her mother is baffling. This "Mommy" locked the child Lucy in a car, when minding her was inconvenient, and compared her pubescent boobs to cows udders. I get it that Lucy is locked into some kind of Stockholm Syndrome with her mother -- but it just doesn't ring true.
The writing style is flat and humorless, and uses stylistic fakery (endless repetition, contradictions, and droning banalities) to make stupid observations sound "deep." It asks us to accept goofy observations about everything from AIDS, to parenthood, to the Inner Life of the Mind as some kind of weird emotional truth.
This is not a "This is so boooring. Why can't there be more explosions ...?" rant. I love books in which "nothing happens." I love unsympathetic characters. Recent 5-star books I have read include novels by Penelope Fitzgerald and Barbara Pym. I think what I loved most about those two authors was the sly humor, the way they punctured pomposity, and yet found an emotional truth that put heart into otherwise off-putting characters. And I'm just not finding anything like that here.
There is a quote (on page 97 of my copy), which hints strongly that Strout knows exactly what she's doing: a writer defends unpopular words she had put in the mouth of one of her characters, saying "It's not my job to make readers know what's a narrative voice and not the private view of the author ..."
But Strout is no Nabokov, and Lucy is no Humbert Humbert. I wish ...
This is HARD, because a number of people who I love and respect, love this book. My first attempt to read it was when I was with my last Book Group, and the consensus was -- they loved it. Echos of the blurb by Hilary Mantel ( ... oh, Hilary, no, not you too!! ...) on the cover of my edition: "Writing of this quality comes from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue."
Obviously, I don't feel that way. IMHO, writing of this quality is about as real as a wooden nickel. The central character is whiny and smug. The mother who visits her at her hospital bedside seems to bear no relationship to the mother she recalls from her abusive childhood. Her relationship with her mother is baffling. This "Mommy" locked the child Lucy in a car, when minding her was inconvenient, and compared her pubescent boobs to cows udders. I get it that Lucy is locked into some kind of Stockholm Syndrome with her mother -- but it just doesn't ring true.
The writing style is flat and humorless, and uses stylistic fakery (endless repetition, contradictions, and droning banalities) to make stupid observations sound "deep." It asks us to accept goofy observations about everything from AIDS, to parenthood, to the Inner Life of the Mind as some kind of weird emotional truth.
This is not a "This is so boooring. Why can't there be more explosions ...?" rant. I love books in which "nothing happens." I love unsympathetic characters. Recent 5-star books I have read include novels by Penelope Fitzgerald and Barbara Pym. I think what I loved most about those two authors was the sly humor, the way they punctured pomposity, and yet found an emotional truth that put heart into otherwise off-putting characters. And I'm just not finding anything like that here.
There is a quote (on page 97 of my copy), which hints strongly that Strout knows exactly what she's doing: a writer defends unpopular words she had put in the mouth of one of her characters, saying "It's not my job to make readers know what's a narrative voice and not the private view of the author ..."
But Strout is no Nabokov, and Lucy is no Humbert Humbert. I wish ...
Having read Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys, I am a fan of Elizabeth Strout's books.
This was a very odd little book, however, although it gave the impression it could be about someone's actual life.
It is a very quick read. I read it in 2 days and probably could have read it in 1.
This was a very odd little book, however, although it gave the impression it could be about someone's actual life.
It is a very quick read. I read it in 2 days and probably could have read it in 1.
This was a quick and easy read, and provided much food for thought about relationships and taking a "time out" to look at life. It would have been a fun book club book, but there was just enough undesireable language to make me somewhat uncomfortable sharing. Nothing that most people wouldn't be okay with, just a bit too much for me.
Cameron-Ashley H. (BigGreenChair) reviewed My Name Is Lucy Barton (Amgash, Bk 1) on + 453 more book reviews
It is a small book, easy read in a day. It hit me more a day after I had finished it and it all had time to sink in, than it did while I was reading it. Don't judge people.
