Tag: female authors

This is a good read; I’d have called it a great read if I hadn’t already read The Bookish Life of Nina Hill and The Garden of Small Beginnings, but I have and it doesn’t quite measure up.  The snappy wit that made me laugh out loud in the first two books was much more subdued in Adult Assembly Required (a title that doesn’t make any obvious sense after reading the book), and while all three tackled some pretty serious anxiety issues, the first two did it with a level of tension that AAR never achieved.  I think I also ‘clicked’ with Nina and Lily, the MC’s of each of the first two books in a way that I didn’t connect with Laura.

Saying that, it really is a good read; I may not have connected with the MC, but holy wow, her parents – well, her mom, really since dad never got any direct page time – was a piece of work.  As was her ex-fiancee.  I’ve met these people in real life, but I’m sort of surprised in this day and age they haven’t gone the way of the dodo.  I really enjoyed seeing the characters from Nina and Garden come back, all slightly further ahead in time; it’s fun to see the ‘after’ part of their happily ever afters.

I’m caught up now with my Waxman reads, but I’ll be on the lookout for whatever she writes next – they’re fun without being horribly shallow, without being stories about a bunch of drama llamas.  A fabulous summer read, even if where you live is in the middle of winter.

Well, this is not the Abbi Waxman I was looking for.  This was a much more intense, painful story than the other 3 I’ve read so far, and while the humor is still there, it’s not at all light-hearted.  This is a story that reads like a fictionalised version of the author’s experience (there is no evidence at all that this is the case).  The language is cruder, the emotions are rawer; there’s a lot of anger.  There’s also a lot of navel gazing about parenthood, which, you know, not really my jam.  But the writing is excellent and I got sucked into the lives of all these people, whether I wanted to be there or not.  A very compelling read.

I bought this book originally purely because of a sign.  Not a portent sign, but an actual sign.  Neon, actually, and registered as a historic landmark, it’s about 2 miles from us and sat over what was the Skipping Girl Vinegar factory.

Anyhoo, it sat on my TBR for years because … I bought it for its dubious coincidence of naming with a sign I’ve always liked.  And I’ve never read The Taming of the Shrew, nor have I previously read any Anne Tyler titles.  But yesterday I picked it up and read the flap and thought, yeah, why not?

It’s an easy one-day read, but it’s weird.  I can’t say I liked it, but it wasn’t bad either.  As individuals, the characters were well constructed, fleshed out.  But put them together in a scene and they didn’t interact well with each other at all – they all turned into mechanical constructs that sort of bumped along together. Was this on purpose?  I don’t know.  But the result was a story that didn’t work, that felt clumsy and dysfunctional.

The ending was … I don’t know what the hell it was.  (See: haven’t read Shakespeare, above.)  It felt like Kate was assimilated into the Borg that is her father and Pyotr.  There was a complete lack of emotion involved and a sense of passivity about all her movements.  And there was quite a rousing Stepford wife speech at the end that I suspect Tyler meant in all sincerity but failed to sell me; had I been in that scene I’d have thrown food at her – preferably something sticky – and told her to get over herself.  But then the epilogue clearly showed me that I missed a cue somewhere in the story, one that showed Kate definitely possessed a will of her own.

So … 3 stars because: weird.