Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg

Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg has an astounding 4.2/5 star rating on Goodreads and I have NO IDEA how this came to be.

The conceit of the novel is that our narrator's mother, a famous photographer, has died recently. The daughter did not have a great relationship with her mother, but nonetheless was put in charge of putting together a retrospective show of her mother's work.  Each photograph has a description of its background, told through an interview the narrator does with someone, a letter, or the narrator's own memories.

This is all good in theory.  In execution, it's flawed. There are no photographs in the book and the descriptions of the photographs are not good enough for this decision to make sense. Now, there's two possible explanations for this decision.  The first, uncharitable, explanation is that the author's writing, while competent, just isn't good enough to fill in the blanks about what makes one photograph better or worse than another.  When the author writes about how the light struck the bench at just the right angle, that legitimately means nothing to me without knowing more (or seeing the damn picture). The second, more charitable, explanation is that the narrator wouldn't describe the photographs in great detail in this format because the photographs would be right in front of a person in a gallery if they were reading all this.  This is still a problem with the format of the book, though.

There was a lot here. Relationships between mothers and daughters, how hard it is to be a single parent, the madness of a creative person, and how to be a creative person who doesn't sell out.  But, frankly, I felt like all of those things were glossed over and the narrator never took a stand on them. Did she feel resentful that her mother virtually neglected her because the mother was too busy taking photos?  I don't know. Did she think the photographs were great?  I don't know. Did she respect her mother for the decisions she made to help her daughter?  I don't know.

I guess that's the take on this book. I just don't know.  I wouldn't recommend it, personally, but 2/4 of the people at our book club this month liked it well enough.