Helpful Score: 3
I really fought to get through this book. It felt disjointed and did not flow well for me. It made large leaps of time without any transition and left many situations unfulfilled. The ending was especially odd. I know that Joyce Carol Oates is supposed to be a great writer, but she left me confused and disappointed in this novel.
Helpful Score: 1
I ended up liking this book, at first I did not, but I picked it up a second time and really enjoyed it. The beginning is a little hard to get through, but once you get through the first 30 pages the story really picks up. It's an interesting testament to how people can change through out their lives, and live a double life. What bothered me about the book is that the main character Rebbecca/Hazel, is so un-emotional. The main character starts her life emotional but then I guess, gets it punished out of her, and she is transformed into to an un-emotional little girl then women from first her father then husband. The oppressive family life was hard to get through for me, it was so sad the way she grew up and was shaped in a way that changed her. I understood and sometimes admired the main character, but ended up not really liking her, I just wished she would FEEL something, and it seems like she never did. I guess overall the book is sad but ends good. I would recommend it. It is given 4 1/2 stars instead of 5 because of the slow beginning.
Could not get into it, didn't get into the writing style.
This was a book club selection for me and I wasn't looking forward to reading it. At all. After maybe 100 pages or so, I really got into it and could not put it down. The book is written in three "sections" and once I reached section two continuing reading became laborsome. As of today, I have 40 pages left to read still, but my interest is completely gone. For me, the main character is not believable and not very likable. It doesn't make sense to me how her educated, German-born parents didn't make an effort to assimilate once they were in the US. Instead they just settled into a life of squalor.
There is a lot of dark subject matter dealt with, but that wasn't the problem for me in this book. Over all it just seems far fetched and unlikely.
There is a lot of dark subject matter dealt with, but that wasn't the problem for me in this book. Over all it just seems far fetched and unlikely.
