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wolfiegrrrl's review
reflective
medium-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.5
The omniscient "stream of consciousness" narration was not my cup of tea.
It feels like when someone's grandma starts telling a story about something mundane that's happening in life at the moment, but she keeps getting derailed by tangential stories ranging from something that happened in the glory days of her youth to a judgemental thought she had about something insignificant that happened the other day.
It becomes clear a few chapters into the book that this is a stylistic choice meant to put you into the straying mind of Mrs. Blessing in her old age and I think this style could be comforting to someone who is interested in reading a story as though it were told from that frayed perspective.
Except, at the very start of the story, I don't know this lady yet and despite the jarring flashbacks she's not interesting to me in the slightest - and neither is the omniscient narrator, no matter how much it snarks about this lady's character flaws, privilege, ignorance, hypocrisy, and bigotry - so why would I be more interested in her childhood when there is an adolescent couple pulling up to the estate in the middle of the night with a mysterious cardboard box? It throws off the pacing of the story and left me feeling dazed and confused.
The only thing I cared about in those early chapters was the groundskeeper who had just adopted an abandoned baby that was fresh out of the womb when it was left in this rich lady's garage by a young couple who clearly Did Not Want A Baby at this time.
That is the only reason I pushed myself to read the entire book and admittedly the longer I stuck with it the more I started to get used to the stream of consciousness. I still am not a huge fan of it and I felt like way too many details were left far too vague to the point where I couldn't tell if I was supposed to be stitching the clues together for myself or if Mrs. Blessing really was just supposed to be that bad at saying what she meant. Given what I did eventually learn about her through the story, I would believe either to be the case. And even though so much information was being thrown at me at once, I still could not point to a single page in the book and tell you what I read there. The information blurs together, which made it very hard to go back and actually look for lines I wanted to reread again - because I had no idea where I had first read them, since the story is not linear for the most part.
My recommendation for anyone who is curious about the summary on the inside/back cover of the book would be to keep powering through like I did because there is some interesting development at the very end of the book when the various points in the story start to come together. If you can push through enough to get used to the narrative style, you might find some worth in there.
It feels like when someone's grandma starts telling a story about something mundane that's happening in life at the moment, but she keeps getting derailed by tangential stories ranging from something that happened in the glory days of her youth to a judgemental thought she had about something insignificant that happened the other day.
It becomes clear a few chapters into the book that this is a stylistic choice meant to put you into the straying mind of Mrs. Blessing in her old age and I think this style could be comforting to someone who is interested in reading a story as though it were told from that frayed perspective.
Except, at the very start of the story, I don't know this lady yet and despite the jarring flashbacks she's not interesting to me in the slightest - and neither is the omniscient narrator, no matter how much it snarks about this lady's character flaws, privilege, ignorance, hypocrisy, and bigotry - so why would I be more interested in her childhood when there is an adolescent couple pulling up to the estate in the middle of the night with a mysterious cardboard box? It throws off the pacing of the story and left me feeling dazed and confused.
The only thing I cared about in those early chapters was the groundskeeper who had just adopted an abandoned baby that was fresh out of the womb when it was left in this rich lady's garage by a young couple who clearly Did Not Want A Baby at this time.
That is the only reason I pushed myself to read the entire book and admittedly the longer I stuck with it the more I started to get used to the stream of consciousness. I still am not a huge fan of it and I felt like way too many details were left far too vague to the point where I couldn't tell if I was supposed to be stitching the clues together for myself or if Mrs. Blessing really was just supposed to be that bad at saying what she meant. Given what I did eventually learn about her through the story, I would believe either to be the case. And even though so much information was being thrown at me at once, I still could not point to a single page in the book and tell you what I read there. The information blurs together, which made it very hard to go back and actually look for lines I wanted to reread again - because I had no idea where I had first read them, since the story is not linear for the most part.
My recommendation for anyone who is curious about the summary on the inside/back cover of the book would be to keep powering through like I did because there is some interesting development at the very end of the book when the various points in the story start to come together. If you can push through enough to get used to the narrative style, you might find some worth in there.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body shaming, Fatphobia, and Grief
Moderate: Child abuse, Confinement, Cursing, Death, Infidelity, Medical content, Physical abuse, Racism, Religious bigotry, and Suicide
Minor: Animal death, Antisemitism, Hate crime, Homophobia, Sexual content, Vomit, and Xenophobia
My head is still swimming from how much was thrown at me, so it's hard to remember what was explicit, moderate, or just minor. I know that the point of the way it was written so casually was to show how Mrs. Blessing is a "product of her time" and has a difficult time changing, but each time something awful came up it felt like another slap in the face.
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