TWIB II-24: 3/10-3/16
Mar. 24th, 2008 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akujunkanOnly one book this week, but it was an Advance Reader's Copy, which was kinda neat.
1) The Sister - Poppy Adams
Poppy Adams' The Sister is one excellently creepy book. It opens, as many books do, in a crumbling English estate. Its narrator is an elderly woman, something of a holdover from an previous age, as is done in many books. But from that point on, all bets are off.
I would love to discuss the plot in painstaking detail, but there's really no way I can without spoiling it for you, and I do think you should read this book. To be honest, not a whole lot happens in The Sister; the bulk of the novel is composed of flashbacks to the narrator's youth and the slice-of-life situations one might imagine would result after two sisters estranged for decades are reunited; all of which builds up to some pivotal choices, events, and outcomes. But oh, these are very well done indeed.
Adams, who was a documentary filmmaker before trying her hand as a novelist, brings a cinematographer's sense of pacing, staging, and ambiance to her narrative. Readers are certain that something is going to happen, just not what. Or when. Adams has also performed the neat trick of creating a character reliable in her unreliability (the meaning of this phrase will become clear to anyone who reads the book), as well as penning what should have been a hackneyed ending with an unusual twist, including the commendable decision to refrain from having the main character reform or see the error of her ways.
A few caveats: my ARC copy was pretty piss-poorly edited: 83 errors in 275 pages, most of them typographical. Also, lepidopterology (the study of moths) plays an integral role in The Sister's plot. I actually enjoyed this aspect of the novel quite a bit, as it offered a chance to learn something about a discipline with which I'm not terribly familiar while being entertained by a cracking good story; nevertheless, I can see how those passages might disagree to readers looking for a more concentrated dose of escapism from their novels. Those two quibbles aside, I found The Sister to be an all around excellent book that left me rather ambivalent about going to bed once I'd finished it.
That will be all.
1) The Sister - Poppy Adams
Poppy Adams' The Sister is one excellently creepy book. It opens, as many books do, in a crumbling English estate. Its narrator is an elderly woman, something of a holdover from an previous age, as is done in many books. But from that point on, all bets are off.
I would love to discuss the plot in painstaking detail, but there's really no way I can without spoiling it for you, and I do think you should read this book. To be honest, not a whole lot happens in The Sister; the bulk of the novel is composed of flashbacks to the narrator's youth and the slice-of-life situations one might imagine would result after two sisters estranged for decades are reunited; all of which builds up to some pivotal choices, events, and outcomes. But oh, these are very well done indeed.
Adams, who was a documentary filmmaker before trying her hand as a novelist, brings a cinematographer's sense of pacing, staging, and ambiance to her narrative. Readers are certain that something is going to happen, just not what. Or when. Adams has also performed the neat trick of creating a character reliable in her unreliability (the meaning of this phrase will become clear to anyone who reads the book), as well as penning what should have been a hackneyed ending with an unusual twist, including the commendable decision to refrain from having the main character reform or see the error of her ways.
A few caveats: my ARC copy was pretty piss-poorly edited: 83 errors in 275 pages, most of them typographical. Also, lepidopterology (the study of moths) plays an integral role in The Sister's plot. I actually enjoyed this aspect of the novel quite a bit, as it offered a chance to learn something about a discipline with which I'm not terribly familiar while being entertained by a cracking good story; nevertheless, I can see how those passages might disagree to readers looking for a more concentrated dose of escapism from their novels. Those two quibbles aside, I found The Sister to be an all around excellent book that left me rather ambivalent about going to bed once I'd finished it.
That will be all.