Helpful Score: 2
American Book Award-winner (Stones for Ibarra) Doerr examines the lives of a group of American expatriates recently settled in Mexico. With an unfailingly true ear, eye, and voice, Doerr captures the most complex and moving details of Americans in a foreign land.
Helpful Score: 2
So I think I like female authors more than the typical male does. Not chick-lit, Dating Big Bird notwithstanding. Female authors have a tendency to write about normalcy, though - things that could happen in unremarkable lives. Or at least have a way of making things feel normal, no matter how strange. I like that.
This book, although it has an actual plot, feels like the recording of a few years of regular lives. And that's cool. I don't know how Doerr did it, making it all feel so normal, especially since there's a very strange death that unfolds, but she did.
And now she's dead. Which just goes to show you.
This book, although it has an actual plot, feels like the recording of a few years of regular lives. And that's cool. I don't know how Doerr did it, making it all feel so normal, especially since there's a very strange death that unfolds, but she did.
And now she's dead. Which just goes to show you.
Helpful Score: 1
'In her customary crystalline prose, Harriet Doerr examines the lives of four North American expatriates in a small Mexican village of a thousand souls. Set on the barren mesa of Amapolas, we see the newcomers settling in their adobe houses and gradually adjusting to an environment of excesses - hot sun, torrential downpour, sweeping landscapes, and a vastness of untouched nature - and watch as each is drawn into the aura of this land and changed.'
Helpful Score: 1
Expatriates settle in a Mexican village for a time. Though they seem to try, they do not join in the life of the people--mostly observe the life around them. It is interesting to see the life (and the memories of their pasts) through their eyes. I enjoyed the book.
Interesting, well written.
