Reviews and Comments

OK, I read this because of the Facebook hook but alas, it did not provide any historical insights into either the pre- or post-Facebook eras. And the teen romance was very slight and fluffy. So: don't bother unless you're 12.

This could have been so much better. Disappointingly glib and rather sexist, with a somewhat cheaply earned sense of 80s academic zeitgeist that keeps it readable. The portrait of David Foster Wallace's manic depression is the only really touching thing in here: the main character, Madeleine, is unpleasantly shallow and might as well be living in a Herman Wouk novel.

Meh. Not vile, but pretty slight as Booker-winners go. What was that about women's fiction being "small" and "domestic" again? How come when Barnes does that, he wins a Booker?

The idea of this (girls with wildly different backgrounds raising Cain at Swiss boarding school camp in the early 70s) was good and the multi-ethnic angle also interesting but in the end it slipped over the edge of the sentimental, I though. But not THAT badly.

I probably would give this a 3.5 but suspect I would really have loved it as a nine-year-old, so. Nicely drawn family stuff, interesting rewrite of the Snow White myth, tough-minded girl protagonist. Nothing pyrotechnic here but also no gothic stupidity like so much kid fiction these days.

This was beautiful in places--I like the magical realism mixed with gritty and sometimes funny story that slowly reveals itself to be an immigrant tale. It was a bit unremittingly grim though. Didn't anyone ever have a happy marriage with surviving kids? Don't girls ever fail to get knocked up? Can't mothers and daughters ever communicate? Still, worth reading and Ilana, the matriarch, is a gripping, tough, magical character.

This is very satisfying for the kind of thing it is, and did not piss me off either as a feminist or (much) as an oh-god-not-another-anachronistic-Mary Sue-tomboy-everyone-loves hater. And it's very readable, and the romance doesn't whack you over the head till the very end.

That sounds like a list of relative virtues, but really, I have a hard time reading fantasy at all lately because of this sort of problem.

I haven't read this since I was a teenager and while the idea of a perfectly open and naturally aristocratic nature raising a woman from genteel poverty to titled riches makes the first half fairly readable, the harping on Emily's perfect normality and confiding childlike nature really cloys. The thing one likes about Mary Lennox and Sara Crewe, in her childre's books, is that they are NOT perfect paragons. I would much rather have read a book about the semi-evil Anglo-Indian wife of the heir.

Plus, there is all kinds of creepy racialist talk about physiognomy that gives me the wiggins.

Not as good as Hard Love, its predecessor, but kind of cute in its way.