This was an odd book. The premise was excellent, but it falls short on so many fronts. The writing style is simplistic, but it's told from the vantage point of a ten year-old girl, so you would expect it to be a bit simple. Each chapter is a story in itself, of sorts, but all pertain to the girl and her sister, and how they cope with their lives. There are scenes of violence against animals which I found gratuitous and unnecessary - the point being made could have been made in another manner. The violence really detracted from what could have been an excellent book.
Helpful Score: 2
I did enjoy this but it left me hanging. I wanted a real ending and it didn't have one. A story of two sisters, growing up with a father who is having mental issues due to war.
This was an odd book. The premise was excellent, but it falls short on so many fronts. The writing style is simplistic, but it's told from the vantage point of a ten year-old girl, so you would expect it to be a bit simple. Each chapter is a story in itself, of sorts, but all pertain to the girl and her sister, and how they cope with their lives. There are scenes of violence against animals which I found gratuitous and unnecessary - the point being made could have been made in another manner. The violence really detracted from what could have been an excellent book.
This was an odd book. The premise was excellent, but it falls short on so many fronts. The writing style is simplistic, but it's told from the vantage point of a ten year-old girl, so you would expect it to be a bit simple. Each chapter is a story in itself, of sorts, but all pertain to the girl and her sister, and how they cope with their lives. There are scenes of violence against animals which I found gratuitous and unnecessary - the point being made could have been made in another manner. The violence really detracted from what could have been an excellent book.
This book was just too disjointed for me. There just wasn't enough of a story for me to connect to it. The writing is beautiful, but I found it hard to read - it was much more like a series of short essays than a novel.
Much of this book revolves around how two pre-teen sisters are growing up and coping with a war haunted father and an emotionally unattached mother. The book is sometimes surreal, drawing the reader into the imagination of the sisters as they make the emotional and physical transition from children to teenagers. There are some scenes containing sexual or violent content.
In her remarkable first novel, Shea hauntingly evokes the spirits and sensations of childhood. The lives of two sisters at the crossroads between childhood and adolescence are described in lyrical, hypnotic prose. Set in the early 1960s, nearly all the action takes place in the backyard of the girls' suburban Virginia home, to them a surreal, adventurous place in which they act out their wishes, hopes and dreams, and try to cope--often ritualistically--with family dysfunction. (fm Amazon.com)
