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The Amateur Marriage
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Blair Brown
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
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Publisher's summary
Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable.
From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more fully into the complex entanglements of family life in this wise, embracing, and deeply perceptive novel.
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"[Anne] Tyler's strength resides in her penetrating psychological portraits and delight in mundane details, and these gifts are evident....Her observations about how abruptly even the most boring life can go wrong, and about the fact that we are all amateurs in our first marriages, are poignant." (Booklist)
"Yes, Tyler intuitively understands the middle class' Norman Rockwell ideal, but she doesn't share it; rather, she has a masterful ability to make it bleed." (Publishers Weekly)
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The first in a new series, Four Seasons, takes us to Deepwater Cove, a small community on the shore of the Lake of the Ozarks, where we're introduced to four couples in different stages of life. It Happens Every Spring centers on Brenda, a lonely wife, and Steve, a go-getter real estate agent, in the mid-winter of their relationship. When a stranger appears at their door one night, change blows through their house and their marriage.
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Amazing book!
- By Rad on 10-07-22
By: Catherine Palmer, and others
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The Walking People
- By: Mary Beth Keane
- Narrated by: Sile Bermingham
- Length: 16 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Greta Cahill never believed she would leave her village in the west of Ireland until she found herself on a ship bound for New York, along with her sister Johanna and a boy named Michael Ward. Labeled a "softheaded goose" by her family, Greta discovers that in America she can fall in love, raise her own family, and earn a living.
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Irish immigratn story
- By Chrissie on 09-10-13
By: Mary Beth Keane
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The Rest of Her Life
- By: Laura Moriarty
- Narrated by: Julia Gibson
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Leigh is the mother of high-achieving, popular high school senior Kara. Their relationship is already strained for reasons Leigh does not fully understand when, in a moment of carelessness, Kara makes a mistake that ends in tragedy, the effects of which not only divide Leigh's family, but polarize the entire community.
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Obnoxious musical interludes ruin the story
- By Joan on 12-25-11
By: Laura Moriarty
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Stars over Sunset Boulevard
- By: Susan Meissner
- Narrated by: Ann Marie Lee
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Los Angeles, present day. When an iconic hat worn by Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind ends up in Christine McAllister's vintage clothing boutique by mistake, her efforts to return it to its owner take her on a journey more enchanting than any classic movie.... Los Angeles, 1938. Violet Mayfield sets out to reinvent herself in Hollywood after her dream of becoming a wife and mother falls apart, and she lands a job on the film set of Gone with the Wind.
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Pass on this
- By Lulew on 03-24-17
By: Susan Meissner
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The One-in-a-Million Boy
- By: Monica Wood
- Narrated by: Chris Ciulla
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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For years, guitarist Quinn Porter has been on the road, chasing gig after gig, largely absent to his twice-ex-wife Belle and their odd, Guinness records-obsessed son. When the boy dies suddenly, Quinn seeks forgiveness for his paternal shortcomings by completing the requirements for one of his son's unfinished Boy Scout badges. For seven Saturdays Quinn does yard work for Ona Vitkus, the spry 104-year-old Lithuanian immigrant the boy had visited weekly.
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Loved it
- By Justin on 10-20-16
By: Monica Wood
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To See the Moon Again
- By: Jamie Langston Turner
- Narrated by: Eva Kaminsky
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
The first step to letting go of the past is forgiving it …Every day of her life Julia Rich lives with the memory of a horrible accident she caused long ago. In the years since, she has tried to hide her guilt in the quiet routine of teaching at a small South Carolina college, avoiding close relationships with family and would-be friends. But one day a phone call from Carmen, a niece she has never met, disrupts her carefully controlled world.
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Beautiful Story of Forgiveness and Selfless Love
- By sharon on 09-20-14
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Far From the Tree
- By: Virginia DeBerry, Donna Grant
- Narrated by: Fran L. Washington
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Celeste English and Ronnie Frazier are sisters, but they couldn't be more different. Celeste is a doctor's wife, living a perfect and elegant façade. But secretly, her marriage is falling apart and her need to control people around her threatens to destroy them all. Ronnie is an actress, living in New York. But she has no money, she has no home, and her life is held together by "chewing gum, paper clips, and spit." When their father dies, the sisters inherit a house in Prosper, North Carolina.
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My Favorite Book So Far, by Far!
- By Dee on 04-19-09
By: Virginia DeBerry, and others
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Bettyville
- By: George Hodgman
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself - an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook - in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can't bring himself to force her from the home both treasure - the place where his father's voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict...
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Title Should Be Georgeville-It's All About George
- By Sara on 10-08-15
By: George Hodgman
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The Untelling
- By: Tayari Jones
- Narrated by: Michele Blackmon
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Aria is no stranger to tragedy. Fifteen years ago, a family outing took the lives of her father and baby sister, leaving remaining members of this fractured family struggling with their own guilt - real and imagined. At 25, Aria believes she can reinvent herself through her planned marriage with all its promise of a family of her own. Her infertility changes her life as swiftly and irrevocably as the urban landscape around her.
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Don’t waste your time!
- By shasha on 09-18-20
By: Tayari Jones
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Family Secrets
- A Novel
- By: Nancy Thayer
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Though Diane Randall’s jewelry business is a great success, her marriage is not, and she finds herself growing lonely as her children near adulthood. Meanwhile, her eighteen-year-old daughter Julia is falling dangerously in love, and Diane’s mother, Jean, is relishing her newfound freedom as a single woman in Europe. Distracted by their individual concerns, the three women are ill-prepared for the crisis that suddenly appears on Diane’s doorstep in the form of a handsome FBI agent asking about an explosive secret that’s laid buried for decades.
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Nancy! Is there a sequel? What?
- By PattieLynn on 12-02-22
By: Nancy Thayer
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Boy, Snow, Bird
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett, Carra Patterson
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty - the opposite of the life she' s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she' d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy' s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white.
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For Literary Lovers
- By M. Shipe on 04-25-14
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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This novel has earned all the recognition ---
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Interesting Story!
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Definitely not my favorite
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The Gap of Time
- William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale Retold: A Novel
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The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s “late plays.” It tells the story of a king whose jealousy results in the banishment of his baby daughter and the death of his beautiful wife. His daughter is found and brought up by a shepherd on the Bohemian coast, but through a series of extraordinary events, father and daughter, and eventually mother too, are reunited.
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Nice take
- By Daniel Crumbo on 10-28-15
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If Morning Ever Comes
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In the debut novel that set her on the path to becoming an American classic, Anne Tyler's If Morning Ever Comes presents a timeless portrait of a young man's homecoming and his ensuing journey through youth, identity, family, and love. Raised among a family of strong-minded women has left Ben Joe Hawkes as something of a worrier, who has always felt like an outsider in his own family.
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Her Worst on Audible
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By: Anne Tyler
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The Tin Can Tree
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- Unabridged
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Story
In the small town of Larksville, the Pike family is hopelessly out of step with the daily rhythms of life. Mrs. Pike seldom speaks, while Mr. Pike maintains a forced stoicism. Only their 10-year-old, Simon, seems able to acknowledge that their world has changed. He just doesn't understand why. The Pikes may choose to stand still, to hide from an unnamable past, but the strange shroud over their home cannot be contained.
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The characterization
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By: Anne Tyler
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A Spool of Blue Thread
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Overall
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Story
"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon..." This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture.
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The Sharp Edge Of Family
- By Sara on 03-10-15
By: Anne Tyler
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A Patchwork Planet
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Performance
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Story
Barnaby Gaitlin was never a bad kid, but he was certainly doing his best to impersonate one. As a teenager, he developed a habit of breaking into other people’s houses. But he wasn’t interested in the valuable loot - he just liked to read people’s mail, peruse their family albums, and maybe pocket a few personal mementos. Now almost 30 and divorced, he finds himself working for Rent-aBack, which helps the elderly and infirm move furniture or take down their Christmas trees. It’s the perfect career for Barnaby.
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amazing
- By Susan on 06-06-21
By: Anne Tyler
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The Beginner's Goodbye
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Anne Tyler gives us a wise, haunting, and deeply moving new novel in which she explores how a middle-aged man, torn apart by the death of his wife, is gradually restored by her frequent appearances: in their house, on the roadway, in the market. Gradually he discovers, as he works in the family's vanity-publishing business, turning out titles that presume to guide beginners through the trials of life, that maybe for this beginner there is a way of saying goodbye.
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Anne Tyler at her Best
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By: Anne Tyler
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Celestial Navigation
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Thirty-eight-year-old Jeremy Pauling has never left home. He lives on the top floor of a Baltimore row house where he creates collages of little people snipped from wrapping paper. His elderly mother putters in the rooms below, until her death. And it is then that Jeremy is forced to take in Mary Tell and her child as boarders. Mary is unaware of how much courage it takes Jeremy to look her in the eye. For Jeremy, like one of his paper creations, is fragile and easily torn - especially when he's falling in love.
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Marginalized characters
- By Linda on 05-05-24
By: Anne Tyler
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Clock Dance
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- Unabridged
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Story
Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life. In 1967, she is a schoolgirl coping with her mother's sudden disappearance. In 1977, she is a college coed considering a marriage proposal. In 1997, she is a young widow trying to piece her life back together. And in 2017, she yearns to be a grandmother but isn't sure she ever will be. Then, one day, Willa receives a startling phone call from a stranger. Without fully understanding why, she flies across the country to Baltimore....
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disappointed
- By Amazon Customer on 07-13-18
By: Anne Tyler
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Noah's Compass
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- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Liam Pennywell, who set out to be a philosopher and ended up teaching fifth grade, never much liked the job at that run-down private school, so early retirement doesnt bother him. But he is troubled by his inability to remember anything about the first night that he moved into his new, spare, and efficient condominium on the outskirts of Baltimore. All he knows when he wakes up the next day in the hospital is that his head is sore and bandaged.
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Doesn't measure up
- By kimberly on 01-13-10
By: Anne Tyler
What listeners say about The Amateur Marriage
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Susan Winter
- 03-28-05
romance? please re-catogorize!
reading this was an unpleasant experience - making you care for the characters in the wonderful opening chapters just enough so that you could feel enormous disappointment when you were left in limbo as to their fate when decades would vanish from their lives. It was really painful. more than a waste of time - this read was downright aggravating! and Audible should not call it romance, more like Greek tragedy.
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10 people found this helpful
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Overall
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- Longtime Customer
- 08-21-13
Incredibly Boring
Would you try another book from Anne Tyler and/or Blair Brown?
No.
Has The Amateur Marriage turned you off from other books in this genre?
No, just from this author.
Which character – as performed by Blair Brown – was your favorite?
Lindy...mostly because I didn't have to put up with her as long.
If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from The Amateur Marriage?
Most of them.
Any additional comments?
I found it interesting to read the other reviews. Hard to believe in many cases we were reading the same book! Maybe if you were already an Anne Tyler fan you cut her some slack. While I cant argue that it was likely a really accurate family portrayal, when I read I want to escape real life. On the plus side, their life was SOOOOO boring it made mine seem exciting by comparison!
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Jana
- 06-28-04
Boring, depressing, waste of time
I've enjoyed reading previous Ann Tyler novels, but this one was like listening to my mother tell me boring stories about old distant relatives I didn't know or care about. It was well read but the story was predictable (wartime couple marry, raise kids, separate, divorce, man remarries, etc.) with each decade and its effects on the family members displayed generically (40s war effects on families; 50s black turtle necks and beatniks; 60s drugs, hippies; etc.) I finally stopped listening a couple hours from the end when I realized I could care less about any of the characters and was feeling punished by having to keep listening to avoid wasting my money.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Lisa
- 01-25-04
Disappointing
Being an Anne Tyler fan I found this book to be less than expected. The characters are hard to warm up to and there seems to be no thread of happiness in this book. Used to the dry nature of Tylers novels I still found this one unsettling in a depressing sort of way.
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15 people found this helpful
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Overall
- John
- 02-06-06
a bad marriage and a bad book
How can one very gifted author write so badly in one book (Amateur Marriage) and so beautifully in others (most of her other books are magnificent)? What was she thinking when she wrote this dull interminable piece of fiction? It is a book of endless character development whose only plot is: a bad marriage gets worse.
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2 people found this helpful
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Performance
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Story
- Sojourner
- 08-27-22
Waste of time
This book did nothing for me. I couldn’t connect w/any of the characters. Pieces were left out that ours have enriched and deepened the book. Feels like it was mostly surface & little character development.
In the end, depressing.
Wouldn’t recommend it.
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Overall
- Sonny
- 08-13-04
TOTAL WASTE OF TIME!!!!!
Sometimes I am just dumbfounded as to who claims to be a writer. The writer goes into great detail describing what she bought at the grocery store or what is included in a meatloaf...but says in passing that the main character died in an accident towards the end of the book...without any elaboration or warning. She constantly skips 10-15 years without mentioning how much time has passed. It's 10 minutes into the dialogue before you discover that the 9 year old she just talked about, is now 18 and in college. "Ten years later" would have been a helpful 3 words she could have used about 10 times in the book. The things she chose to talk about were so boring I would rather watch paint dry. BOO! BOO!
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall
- AmazonShopAHolic
- 04-29-05
Depressing and Frustrating
Too many skipped years. Sad story without much of a redeeming value. You care for the characters, then all of a sudden 10 years go by. You care again and then a main character is suddenly written off. Frustrating. Too many skipped years and the overall story was just sad and depressing.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Sandy R
- 01-31-04
Not up to par
A big Anne Tyler fan, but this fell way short of my expectations. The characters seemed quite flat, and their obvious disinterest in one another did little to pull me in. It was as if every character was sedated in some way... oddly bothered less by the most life-altering events than by the mundane annoyances of their day-to-day lives. Perhaps this was her intention? Either way, I found very little in the way of character development-- a far cry from what I had expected given the quality of her earlier works.
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2 people found this helpful