This is a debut novel by Carol Rifka Brunt. I had not heard of her before. I was returning a book to the library and took a look at other books on the shelf, saw this one, and noticed that there were some excellent review excerpts printed on the cover of the book.
One should never judge a book, by the review excerpts. I think sometimes good buddies write nice things about good buddies' works. One of the excerpts on the first inside pages compares the telling of the story to To Kill a Mockingbird. Not close. A Wall Street Journal quote says the book is Tremendously Moving.
I liked the book okay. Glad I picked it up, but I was not tremendously moved by it. It is told from the perspective of a fourteen year old who has lost her artist uncle. The book is set in 1987 and the uncle is a victim of the AIDS epidemic. The narrator, June, was close to her uncle and becomes close with the uncle's lover. The relationship with the uncle, and then subsequently the lover, has effects on June's family, most significantly her sister and to a lesser extent her mother.
Maybe this is the kind of book that is more appealing to young women or women who remember vividly their teenage years. I was engaged by the novel because the writing, at least initially, was engaging. But I could not relate to the kid or her sister, and thought the parents were just stick figures. There is a reference to South Pacific throughout because the sister has a major role in it. There is a hint of an unorthodox situation between the sister and the play director, but that never gets explained--nor can I figure out why the references to the play were so frequent.
The book seemed like the diary of a young girl written in the mid 80s that had been edited and published twenty five years later. I read the first sections of an interview with the author that appears at the end of the book, and my notion does not seem to be accurate.
In sum, easy and sometimes engaging read, but I could not relate to the main character or believe many of the others.
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Maybe this is the kind of book that is more appealing to young women or women who remember vividly their teenage years. I was engaged by the novel because the writing, at least initially, was engaging. But I could not relate to the kid or her sister, and thought the parents were just stick figures. www.containerhomereview.com
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