Helpful Score: 2
This is a very powerful book, with a story that is both difficult and beautiful to read. The writer's language can be both poetic and rough. This tale of a family torn apart by war and the circumstances of birth is one that will stay with you.
This seems to be one of those books to which most readers either connect deeply or don't connect at all. I didn't really connect with this book, although I can appreciate why other readers loved it.
This book takes a little work to get into: it starts with the story of Robert Leavitt, an American soldier in the Korean war in 1950, then jumps to the story of Lark, a girl living in West Virginia in 1959, and then to her aunt Nonie, and then to her brother Termite, and around and about. It takes a while (almost to the end of the book) to see how some of these stories are connected, and when I read that some of the chapters have been previously published as short stories, I saw that in some sense they never really were connected. Termite's chapters are very abstract, which makes them difficult, but they are worth the effort in the end.
Once I managed to sink all the way into the book, I liked it more. I got the sense that Phillips pulled together her favourite shorter pieces of fiction and knit them into a novel. It was satisfying, but to me it felt like piecework and not a unified effort. A more definitive ending (or, even better, a more definitive conflict) might have helped, but I think this style of novel just isn't to my taste.
This book takes a little work to get into: it starts with the story of Robert Leavitt, an American soldier in the Korean war in 1950, then jumps to the story of Lark, a girl living in West Virginia in 1959, and then to her aunt Nonie, and then to her brother Termite, and around and about. It takes a while (almost to the end of the book) to see how some of these stories are connected, and when I read that some of the chapters have been previously published as short stories, I saw that in some sense they never really were connected. Termite's chapters are very abstract, which makes them difficult, but they are worth the effort in the end.
Once I managed to sink all the way into the book, I liked it more. I got the sense that Phillips pulled together her favourite shorter pieces of fiction and knit them into a novel. It was satisfying, but to me it felt like piecework and not a unified effort. A more definitive ending (or, even better, a more definitive conflict) might have helped, but I think this style of novel just isn't to my taste.
I enjoyed this unique story set in 1950 and 1959, it tells the story of Lark and her younger brother Termite, who have been orphaned and are being raised by their Aunt Nonnie. The author paints a great picture of the "family" that they have created, tells us the backstory of how they came to be where they are and explains the deep bond between siblings.
Fine reading. Thanx!
