Helpful Score: 6
This is basically a character study, which is fine, but too much description, and moved too slowly for me. I kept at it almost to the end, but finally gave up about 100 pages before the end of this 517-page book. The characters are well-drawn, and the concept is good. Just a bit longer than it should have been.
Helpful Score: 3
I don't think I have ever read a work of fiction before that is nearly 500 pages long and in which nothing happens. "Nothing" -- not as in a lack of car chases or plot twists, but as in a complete absence of the elements that make the stuff of good fiction: character development, conflict, change of any kind. O'Nan's book is stuffed with the mundane details of everyday life, which he does an exacting job of chronicling in painfully minute detail (right down to the scene in which one of the characters has a bout of diarrhea in the bathroom). Yet by the end of these pointless meanderings, none of the characters has grown in any way, or gained any insight into either themselves or one another. They remain static, isolated from one another, and eminently unlikeable. Small, niggling details remain unanswered (why is one character's name spelled two different ways? Bad editing? At first I thought there might be a pattern according to how she was thought of by the other characters, but finally I just gave up and tried to ignore the nagging discrepancy). O'Nan is great at eliciting the familiar details of family interactions and the physical environment, but so what? that in itself doesn't make a novel. The book reads like one long exercise in a fiction-writing workshop. I trudged on until the end, hoping for something, anything, to justify its existence, but to no avail. I'll never get back the hours of my life I wasted reading this book.
Helpful Score: 3
Stewart O'nan does it again. This is not a book to put down and pick up later without backtracking. Lots of Characters and many issues I enjoyed it, but would have liked it to have been an easier read.
Helpful Score: 3
Pretty good book....Left me with some unanswered questions
Helpful Score: 2
I am sorry to say that I could not finish this book.
I feel guilty to say the least. But so many books and so little time! Even though the author wrote beautifully, the plot went nowhere. Their lives at the cabin which takes place over a week's time,seemed like a year. I did not connect with the characters to even care what happened to them. To tell you the truth, I enjoyed reading about Rufus the most and he is the family's springer spaniel.
I feel guilty to say the least. But so many books and so little time! Even though the author wrote beautifully, the plot went nowhere. Their lives at the cabin which takes place over a week's time,seemed like a year. I did not connect with the characters to even care what happened to them. To tell you the truth, I enjoyed reading about Rufus the most and he is the family's springer spaniel.
O'Nan's hefty novel is proof positive that an engrossing, encompassing read doesn't have to include international spies, doomed spacecraft, intricate heists, or high-speed car chases. There are no superheroes here, no monstrous villains â just a group of people related by blood or marriage, who come together for one last week at the summer home which is being sold after multiple generations of the Maxwell family have made memories there.
The narrative follows the quotidian tasks of surviving a week in close contact with multiple generations of an extended family. What are we eating, who is cooking it, who has to do the dishes? What do we do when it rains and the youngest generation is antsy and bored? Anyone who has ever endured a family reunion, particularly as an in-law or adolescent, will recognize the endless jigsaw puzzle, board game, enforced family fun events as excruciating chores, occasionally tinged by grudgingly acknowledged â if fleeting â moments of incandescence.
But it's also an incisive look at nine people whose pasts and futures, needs and wants, have interlocked in a towering Jenga of love and resentment, memory and loss, struggle and acceptance. And every one of them, from retired teacher Arlene, seeing her brother's widow cavalierly parting with a property that by rights should be half hers, to eight-year-old Justin, struggling with his parents' divorce and the heavy burden of always being the baby of the group, gets their POV moment. The characters run true and deep, rubbing against each other in the lakeside cabin, sorting through the keepsakes and deciding what to take and what to leave behind as they prepare for this watershed event in all their lives.
A satisfying, juicy read, regardless of the season.
The narrative follows the quotidian tasks of surviving a week in close contact with multiple generations of an extended family. What are we eating, who is cooking it, who has to do the dishes? What do we do when it rains and the youngest generation is antsy and bored? Anyone who has ever endured a family reunion, particularly as an in-law or adolescent, will recognize the endless jigsaw puzzle, board game, enforced family fun events as excruciating chores, occasionally tinged by grudgingly acknowledged â if fleeting â moments of incandescence.
But it's also an incisive look at nine people whose pasts and futures, needs and wants, have interlocked in a towering Jenga of love and resentment, memory and loss, struggle and acceptance. And every one of them, from retired teacher Arlene, seeing her brother's widow cavalierly parting with a property that by rights should be half hers, to eight-year-old Justin, struggling with his parents' divorce and the heavy burden of always being the baby of the group, gets their POV moment. The characters run true and deep, rubbing against each other in the lakeside cabin, sorting through the keepsakes and deciding what to take and what to leave behind as they prepare for this watershed event in all their lives.
A satisfying, juicy read, regardless of the season.
