I should have known it was trouble that the book started with encomia on previous books by the same author. Thank You for All Things is a heavy-footed story of an unlikely “people genius”, 11-year old Lucy, who has an unlikely 180-point IQ brother, too geeky to believe, an intensely private mother, and a liberated grandmother [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘family’
May 2, 2008
A death in the Family by James Agee
A Death in the FAmily is an unfinished novel but don’t let that prevent you from reading it: there is a strong story even if some of the narrative fragments don’t quite fit together. The book follows a family whose father dies in a car crash in the early 20th century and is told mostly [...]
May 2, 2008
Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
What do you get when you put together a spelling ace, kleptomaniac mother, a father disappointed by his daughter’s lack of intellectual gifts, and an apparently perfect son? Both a dysfunctional family and Bee Season. Golberg’s funny and sad story about spelling bees recalls other contests where parents forget themselves and invade their children’s lives [...]
April 4, 2008
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
WIth a wonderful, dreamy start on a remote island in the midst of civil war where the children are entranced by their (volunteer) teacher’s reading of Dicken’s Great Expectations, Mister Pip dead-ends into a forgettable ending, but the first 100 pages are a wonderful escape into a far-away world. I imagine it’s even better if [...]
