by Jane Smiley
Smiley uses King Lear as her framework for this novel. We have the ailing patriarch, a kingdom in decline and his three contesting daughters. And as you’re reading you’re often wondering to what extent Smiley is going to mirror the Shakespeare plot. The plot of King Lear would be melodramatic vaudev...
bookshelves: published-1991, spring-2014, tbr-busting-2014, film-only, north-americas, bucolic-or-pastoral, classic, families, pulitzer, incest-agameforallthefamily, medical-eew, mental-health, filthy-lucre, slit-yer-wrists-gloomy Read from March 15 to 16, 2014 A modern telling of King Lear.4.5* T...
This only highlights how long its been since I've been 'actively' reviewing books, but not only did I read this back in May, this is the first review I've written since the "let's divorce author discussion from book reviews" debacle.I've read [author reference deleted] in the past, and in those revi...
I read this when I was 15 or 16. Maybe if I read it now I'd like it better.
A book so good it will cause me to re-evaluate every other book I've given five stars to this year, and measure every one I read for the rest of the year against it.
When I first picked up this book it assumed it was going to be just another epic: love, tragedy all pretty trite and predictable.But the quality of the writing, both narrative and descriptive, and the logical development of the plot raise it above the usual fodder and make it both an fascinating an...
When this book was chosen by our book club for this month's theme of "tragedy," I approached reading it with some trepidation. There are a number of things that I don't care for in literature, and one of them is the family drama which centers on the drama as drama for its own sake, rather than to sa...
I read this book sometime during the 90s long before my Goodreads.com days. The following review is from PageADay Book Lover's Calendar for April 7, 2013:It has to be said that Jane Smiley’s inspiration for this novel came from Shakespeare’s King Lear, and yet in this Pulitzer Prize winner she make...
Log in with Facebook 
