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Title: The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel ISBN: 1-4000-3334-9 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 13 May, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.18 (33 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A flawed gem
Comment: It is a tribute to Haven Kimmel's strengths as a writer that this is a good book despite its flaws. Her story draws together a troubled small-town pastor, a depressed young woman, and two traumatized children. In other hands this could have been very grim, but Kimmel has a light touch, a quirky sense of humor, and great love for all her characters. She has a poet's eye for the perfect phrase and the perfect moment to stop. Langston and Townsend are complex and believable, not always likeable, but always intelligent.
As to the flaws, readers of "A Girl Named Zippy" will be surprised to find out that the young girl who refused to believe in God has grown up to find, not just religion, but esoteric and erudite theology. We are expected to believe that an entire small-town family and the town's pastor share a deep interest in Kierkegaard, Nietzche, and St. Thomas Aquinas. It's possible, but reads like a projection of the author's interests. While many great novels have dealt with religious doubts and searching, constant references to theologians are best left out.
The ending of the book is pleasing and beautifully told (Langston's loving speech to the children going off to school is priceless), but not believable. While we have seen some signs of the pastor's changing feelings toward Langston, we are unprepared for her about face.
In spite of these flaws, the book is a beautiful rendition of people awakening from pain to find themselves woven firmly into each others lives.
Rating: 5
Summary: Not your average light summer read
Comment: Placed into my hands by a woman at my neighborhood bookstore who said, 'Read this,' what a wonderful discovery this book was. Langston Braverman (and howz THAT for a great name for your character?) returns home (after a grim end to an affair and in the middle of her PhD orals) not for the usual reasons; she wants to get away from it all. But she find herself right in the middle of it all, the biggest 'it' being the death of her childhood friend and the fact that she's asked to help care for her friends deeply disturbed daughters. With great story lines, believable dialog, and revised Midwestern values, we read, compulsively hooked, as these troubled individuals struggle to find solace and peace.
Rating: 1
Summary: Unlikely in the extreme
Comment: I've never submitted a review before, and what moves me to do so today is the fact that I find myself bewildered as to the accolades and recommendations that this book has accrued. Above all, I've never found myself so at odds with Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal. But this book simply exasperated me with its abstruse philosophical musings set forth as casual dialogue between characters, and its awkward and self-conscious plot structure. Englightenment came when I read the acknowledgments and learned that the author's godmother, upon hearing Kimmel bemoan the fact that she would never write a doctoral dissertation on Alfred North Whitehead and the nature of grief, advised, "You could always write it as a novel." That is clearly what happened, and the result is an extremely ponderous piece of pedantry disguised as a novel.
Another woeful shortcoming is the laughably unrealistic dialogue the protagonist directs toward the 6 and 8-year girls in the story. An example:
"And then I went back to schoo,l, and I tried, I did, I thought-well, I knew that there were far worse things than losing a lover, and so I just avoided him assiduously, I studied for my prelims and assembled a dissertation committee and completed my proposal, and then I showed up for my orals and he was sitting there with [his new wife.] He was give me this paternal look-paternal, Immaculata? fatherly? like a priest?-and I could see that he was trying to say something to me, something about how he'd found me and saved me, he had, in some measure, made me what I was, and he had come because he was proud of me."
Even assuming a level of precociousness on the part of Immaculata, which the author has not specified, would any 8 year old be able to parse that passage??
I read this book because my book group will review it next month; its occupancy on my bookshelf will end with an eviction notice the next day.
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Title: A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana (Today Show Book Club #3) by HAVEN KIMMEL ISBN: 0767915054 Publisher: Broadway Books Pub. Date: 03 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Something Rising (Light and Swift) : A Novel by Haven Kimmel ISBN: 0743247752 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 06 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Pharmacist's Mate: A Story of Birth, Death, Guitars, and Goldfish by Amy Fusselman ISBN: 0142002356 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Waiting for April: A Novel by Scott M. Morris ISBN: 1565123700 Publisher: Algonquin Books Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux ISBN: 0375414746 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 17 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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