Helpful Score: 1
Anton is dying of pancreatic cancer and his life flashes before him and before his wives and children.
The various voices in the novel were sometimes confusing at first but they lent themselves to a real picture of Anton and his life and death.
I found the religious thoughts of Anton fascinating and I also found him disgusting much of the time. Family relationships are always difficult and McPhee writes of each member well.
There were many lies in this story and we don't always know who is telling the truth. We do get a good picture of a man's life and how control can be lost or won.
The various voices in the novel were sometimes confusing at first but they lent themselves to a real picture of Anton and his life and death.
I found the religious thoughts of Anton fascinating and I also found him disgusting much of the time. Family relationships are always difficult and McPhee writes of each member well.
There were many lies in this story and we don't always know who is telling the truth. We do get a good picture of a man's life and how control can be lost or won.
Helpful Score: 1
This book is insightful and interesting enough, but I just did not care for any of the characters. Maybe because I did not read Bright Angle Time, which introduced them.
This book follows the lives of the joined family we met in Bright Angel Time. This book was just as hard to put down as the first.
Charismatic therapist Anton Furey is dying, and the tribe he heads - his five chilren, his wife's three, and their uniting child, Alice - has returned to Chardin, the farm where they grew up and played out Anton's vision of communal living. They had been famous for being the new American blended family, their utopian lifestyle chronicled by film crews and reporters. But as Anton grows weaker, the hurts and betrayals of those years boil to the surface , and the children find themselves reliving their knotty intimacies as they struggle to make their peace with Anton - and with themselves. With shimmering prose and an acutely observant eye, McPhee has created a portrait of a family that explores the limits, and obligations, of love.
I will always read a book by Martha McPhee.
Great condition, National book award finalist.
