very funny composition ethic here today...can use the webpage...but NOT..unless I 'select' all first then delete..and I get an indicator so I know it will record my typing...wahoo!!
meanwhile, Alice Hoffman's book Blue Diary that I just finished reading..well, it starts out the kind of story one hasn't read in evwer times..a happily married couple? really? he's devoted to her, she's happy as a clam, they have a son (only one??) they have a house and jobs and he's devoted to the community at large, volunteer firefighter (they're still in love, really?) she has almost normal friends almost meaning that her bestie didn't ever know who was devoted to her...and she married stumbody stupid but then she gets into the devoted guy who's still devoted after 3 kids with someone else..well, anyway...this story starts out like once upon a time in totally dreamily happy land...and you want to get with theprogram and believe it all works just like that but hey, does it? it's a blueprint for happiness, the beginning of this story but it unravels like a poorly knit sweater, one long string of gloop that descends over the wellbuilt beginning like frosting too runny to put on the cake, it drools all over the place going from a murdered redhead to a breast cancer sick redhead to a valiant volunteer firefighter with burned hands to a manical narcissist minimally aware of his ability to kill another person (well, he let the middleaged sponsoress off without a slap but did that prove anything??)..Hoffman doesn't draw much of a fine line in her initially solid characters, the happily married pair who are so good for themselves and for their little homespun community that has trees living since colonial days (I had a house that was preColonial and it was just fine, assumably so was the apple tree in the story that made bad apples)...ok so blame the faulty characters on the bad apple growing tree that was in front of the library since late 1700's..maybe you could...but there's so much inbetween stuff in this story, such good filling, you keep on reading and you know it's not going to improve once it gets off the deep end and the main hero does bad stuff...you find it hard to see that he could, well, he'd done this in his past life and now he's going to pay...all reference to the blessed union that sounds so gay in the beginning are put to bed like so many young children needing their beauty sleep...it's plausible but does it wash? not me ..it seemed more like an exercise in how to read like mad for hours looking for the good part..you find out the best happiness you can squeeze from this is story is the secondary character's romance with the man who's been devoted to her always...and SHE has breast cancer...well...is that what we can hope for? it seems as if the initial love and bliss of the main characters was just a paper exercise for the author because as soon as she explodes that bliss with the kiloton bomb of early history (and I might add the chopping of the old apple tree) we're off on a big chunk of depression causing activity both for the characters in the story and for the reader...the skies were gray and weepy but I didn't feel l ike crying for these characters...I just thought, yeah I heard enough times how warm it gets in massachusetts in the summer but then I actually lived on Maryland's Tidewater so I know all about that landscape and yeah, I even knew about a young neighborwoman's murder, across the street no less..! so I had some vague faint quaint history that lured me into continuing to read this book but where it lost me was right in the beginning when the heretofore amorous romantic husband is escorted out of his home. I think we need more of the former and none of the latter...that's my vote
meanwhile, Alice Hoffman's book Blue Diary that I just finished reading..well, it starts out the kind of story one hasn't read in evwer times..a happily married couple? really? he's devoted to her, she's happy as a clam, they have a son (only one??) they have a house and jobs and he's devoted to the community at large, volunteer firefighter (they're still in love, really?) she has almost normal friends almost meaning that her bestie didn't ever know who was devoted to her...and she married stumbody stupid but then she gets into the devoted guy who's still devoted after 3 kids with someone else..well, anyway...this story starts out like once upon a time in totally dreamily happy land...and you want to get with theprogram and believe it all works just like that but hey, does it? it's a blueprint for happiness, the beginning of this story but it unravels like a poorly knit sweater, one long string of gloop that descends over the wellbuilt beginning like frosting too runny to put on the cake, it drools all over the place going from a murdered redhead to a breast cancer sick redhead to a valiant volunteer firefighter with burned hands to a manical narcissist minimally aware of his ability to kill another person (well, he let the middleaged sponsoress off without a slap but did that prove anything??)..Hoffman doesn't draw much of a fine line in her initially solid characters, the happily married pair who are so good for themselves and for their little homespun community that has trees living since colonial days (I had a house that was preColonial and it was just fine, assumably so was the apple tree in the story that made bad apples)...ok so blame the faulty characters on the bad apple growing tree that was in front of the library since late 1700's..maybe you could...but there's so much inbetween stuff in this story, such good filling, you keep on reading and you know it's not going to improve once it gets off the deep end and the main hero does bad stuff...you find it hard to see that he could, well, he'd done this in his past life and now he's going to pay...all reference to the blessed union that sounds so gay in the beginning are put to bed like so many young children needing their beauty sleep...it's plausible but does it wash? not me ..it seemed more like an exercise in how to read like mad for hours looking for the good part..you find out the best happiness you can squeeze from this is story is the secondary character's romance with the man who's been devoted to her always...and SHE has breast cancer...well...is that what we can hope for? it seems as if the initial love and bliss of the main characters was just a paper exercise for the author because as soon as she explodes that bliss with the kiloton bomb of early history (and I might add the chopping of the old apple tree) we're off on a big chunk of depression causing activity both for the characters in the story and for the reader...the skies were gray and weepy but I didn't feel l ike crying for these characters...I just thought, yeah I heard enough times how warm it gets in massachusetts in the summer but then I actually lived on Maryland's Tidewater so I know all about that landscape and yeah, I even knew about a young neighborwoman's murder, across the street no less..! so I had some vague faint quaint history that lured me into continuing to read this book but where it lost me was right in the beginning when the heretofore amorous romantic husband is escorted out of his home. I think we need more of the former and none of the latter...that's my vote
No comments:
Post a Comment