On one hand, it really resonated with me. An academic who does everything right and ends up, at the end of a career, with nothing to show for it and an inability to retire? That resonates with me, as it is one of my greatest fears. A couple ends up with a house that is slowly disintegrating around them as they watch with no money to pay someone to fix it and no ability to fix it themselves? That resonates with me, as it's not so much a fear in my life, so much as a reality.
I also really thought the historical fiction parts of the book were about an interesting place. Vineland, New Jersey was the utopian vision of Charles Landis, a man who preached prohibition and practiced otherwise. I thought the way the novel showed the hypocrisy of the entire town (and contrasted with modern hypocrisy) was actually interesting.
But at the same time this book didn't really resonate with me. It's full of lectures that range in topic from religion to politics to plant biology. Don't even get me started on the free speech rants. And those lectures came from characters who didn't necessarily earn my trust. And, while I generally agree with Kingsolver's political views, I could imagine that those who don't agree with her would be turned off by the repeated diatribes.
More importantly, though, I just felt that the characters were poorly written. Particularly the women. One woman knows her husband has cheated on her and holds a bit of resentment over it, but he's just sooooo dreamy she can't stop loving him. Another woman dies and is treated as little more than a prop throughout the entire book. Another woman's husband leaves her and she actually becomes very successful in her own right, completely without him. But you know that by the end of the book she ends up with a man because no woman could be happy on her own. I just...it made me mad.
Kingsolver has something, she really does. But this book just didn't come together for me.
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