What a weird book. That's basically my entire take on the situation. Original premise, but I can't say much beyond that.
I'm not suggesting that male authors can't write female characters or vice versa, but Lillian's voice always felt like a dude to me. Her inner thoughts were a sort of straightforward, in the way that men are frequently written. There were no digressions about her anxiety, body image, or performance of womanhood. Instead there were digressions about basketball and feeling sorrow at a lack of career ambition. At some point, I just stopped thinking about gender expressions in this book because it was too confusing. Maybe that's good for me and I should stop reading such gender normative books all the time.
The last two things I'll say to you is that this book has a lot of unnecessary profanity. I am not a person who generally gets on my soapbox about expletives, but the word fuck appears 2/3 as many times as the number of pages and it started to feel like a sign of bad writing. The other thing I'd like to say is that this book had so much promise in terms of plot, but instead it involved lots of preparing foods and talking about sleeping arrangements. The father was a major political figure, so I'm not sure why we couldn't have had at least a few scenes where things were less...mundane.
Big swing. Fell short for me. 3/5 stars
Lines of note:
Mint Julep Boys, like they would drink a mint julep on a regular day and they wouldn’t think it was weird. (page 51)
I think this is what's interesting about people in general. We all do things on a regular day that other people would think is strange. I fully admit that when I hear someone ate out at a restaurant more than once a month, I am SHOOK to my core. How can you afford that? How do you not weigh a hundred pounds? How do you control the food situation? But for other people, hearing that the bagel I had at Panera last week was the first restaurant food I'd had since May would be shocking. And it's interesting how we make judgments about people based on these differences.
“I’m scared to meet him,” I admitted.
“I’m a little scared for you to meet him,” she said. “I hope you don’t hate him.” I didn’t say anything because I was pretty sure that, just on principle, I was going to hate him. I didn’t like men all that much, found them tiring. (page 52)
This is an example of how it didn't seem like Lillian was a real woman. Generally, I don't find men tiring. I find them scary, insufferable, full of themselves, and occasionally pleasant to be around, but rarely have I described them as tiring.
Maybe raising children was just giving them the things you loved most in the world and hoping that they loved them, too. (page 139)
But what do you do if they don't love the same things you do?
Things I looked up:
Penny Nichols' novels (page 218) - Four book series published in the 1930s written by Joan Clark that follows Penny Nichols, the daughter of a detective who soon brings her along to help his investigations.
Hat mentions:
She’d started at the lowest rung, brought on because the normally untouchable senator had recently left his wife and two kids and started dating one of his biggest donors, some heiress who was obsessed with horses and wore crazy hats. (page 21)
Just then, as if conjured by my curiosity, a man wearing suspenders and a big floppy hat walked across the backyard; he was holding a rake like a soldier marching with a rifle. (page 39)
I got some underwear and bras, a bathing suit like Olympic athletes wore, and a cool bucket hat to keep the sun out of my eyes. (page 49)
I read this book and liked it fine, I feel lukewarm about it. I tend to not enjoy books by male authors in general.
ReplyDeleteI am more and more on your side on this side of not reading male authors much. I read mostly men for the first 40 years of my reading life and now I'm going to transition to reading mostly women. It seems fair. And I think it is YOUR commentary on books that made me feel so strongly that this book felt like a man writing a woman. I wonder if I hadn't know that the author was a dude if I would have picked up on that, though. Sometimes I think I should "blind read" without knowing anything about the author.
DeleteI definitely eat out frequently, but I know what you mean: I still remember how shaken I was in college to meet someone who had never been on an airplane. My family moved around a lot when I was little, so I was probably on my first plane around age 1, and though we were hardly jet-setters, I had in fact been in school in England for a year before starting college, so--never been on a plane? Never?
ReplyDeleteExactly! I got married in St. Paul, Minnesota and one of our guests had never been outside the state of Michigan before our wedding. This was a man in his 30s. I was shocked, but it was utterly normal to him.
DeleteI read this book and really loved it. I don't recall the profanity and usually that kind of thing does irk me as it seems unnecessary especially when over-used. We are reading his most recent novel this fall. It was one of the 3 books I suggested (we each suggest 3 books and vote) so it's my book club to "host." I've heard mixed reviews, though, so am nervous about how well it will go over.
ReplyDeleteWe eat out less than the average family, I think. Part of it is frugality, part of it is my gluten intolerance. And I know that the more we eat out with our kids, the better they will handle it, but we don't eat out often in general so they won't get the exposure to eating out unless we really try and it seems like a waste of time/money since it's not something we highly value! I have a lot of thoughts about dining out clearly.
Oh, wow! Isn't it funny what we notice. I rarely notice profanity or if a romance novel is closed or open door, but for some people, those are dealbreakers.
DeleteOoohhh...I'm nervous for you to host a book by this author! What if you don't like it?! What are you going to do?!
I feel that way too, but plenty of people in my book club will do that! They'll suggest all books they haven't read yet. I always suggest books I've already read, so that I know I like it and don't have to worry I won't want to finish it. I am really past the stage in my life when I will finish a book that I don't want to.
DeleteWe won't read a book in our book club if someone has already read it (for the most part!), so there's always a chance if you recommend a book it will be a stinker. But we don't have a designated "host" or anything like that and we don't keep good records/memories of who recommended a book, so it's low pressure. I feel like Lisa's book club is so much more structured! It's making me nervous for her!
DeleteI actually don't feel as nervous about it as I would if I had picked it completely on my own. But since everyone votes on the books, I will feel less bad if it's a flop! I like the way our book club is structured, though. And the reason we vote up front for all the books for the year is because most of us exclusively read books from the library so I set the cadence of books based on the ebook availability at Hennepin County! We used to have a person pick a book without input from others and I didn't like that set up as much. Now at least the majority of the club has voted to read the book. I do hope I like the book but sometimes the ones we don't like make for the best conversations.
DeleteYour book club is so much more organized than ours, Lisa! I'm impressed that you plan ahead so far in advance!
DeleteGuess who the book club organizer extraordinaire is? ;) I'm kind of referred to as the book club boss. Ha. We've taken this voting approach for several years now and it works so well! But I love looking up the hold lists and figuring out what will be available first, etc. It's such an odd source of joy for me!
DeleteOhh, I listened to this book and I loved it. The female protagonist voice didn't feel male to me, but perhaps because it was a female voice reading it.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I would have had a different experience if I'd listened to the audiobook.
DeleteI loved this book. That line you highlighted, about giving kids the things you most loved in the world, is probably one of my favorite lines ever in a book.
ReplyDeleteIt's so interesting about male/female voice as writers. I once read (or heard) Elizabeth Gilbert in an interview and she said that critics have often said she had a very masculine voice - I think she also had written a lot for GQ as a journalist. And I remember thinking, "What does that mean?" I was reading Signature of All Things at the time and I would read bits of that book and think, "Is *this* turn of phrase considered masculine?"
For me, it's not necessarily about the wording or phrasing that comes off as gendered, but rather the thoughts and the train of thoughts. This characters just didn't feel like a real woman in the way she thought about things. All of that said, the way this comes off would vary greatly from person to person, I bet.
DeleteThis book was a DNF from me; I can't remember if it was all the swearing. I really find it so distracting when expletives get overused.
ReplyDeleteIf I noticed the swearing, it was really prevalent. LOL. That's another thing that made it read more like a man than a woman, I think. I mean, I swear, but not in EVERY conversation I ever have. But maybe that's me being sexist.
DeleteInteresting! It seems like most people loved this. I never read it- I don't have much of an interest in it, and now I'll take your word for it and skip it.
ReplyDeleteI think you can safely skip it. :)
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