by Richard Russo
There are two weddings used as bookends with a year in the protagonist's life in between. Jack Griffin, after 34 years of marriage, is dealing with the question of who he wants to be when he grows up. His life has sort of snuck up on him and he's not sure if he's happy with where he ends up.We get t...
I know the reviews for this book weren't stellar, and there were moments when I thought the book was a hot mess, but mostly I enjoyed it. The best and most coherent part of the book was Griffan's relationship with his mother, I just wish he hadn't added a marriage breakup and a mid-life crisis to ...
Really enjoyed this one!!
I read this in an advance copy. It didn't grab me in the same way Empire Falls did and it is rather short so some of the characters were not thoroughly developed but Russo was able to capture the main esseence of their personalities so that you will see people you know in different aspects of each c...
Am a big Russo fan and enjoyed this shorter and lighter work.
Griffin goes to weddings, loves his wife, is estranged from his wife, carries his parents’ ashes in the trunk of his car, and longs to visit the Cape again.That’s the whole book. I hope I didn’t give anything away.A long, long section in the middle that dragged so much I wanted to put the book down....
A throwaway moment with a character who appears in a scant three or four pages sums up some of the best things about this book, and about Russo:Griffin couldn't tell whether the frozen grimace on the man's face [the product of, it seems, a stroke:] represented joy or pain, but decided, arbitrarily, ...
The title refers to a modification of the song “That Old Black Magic,” a tune sung with verve and hope by narrator Jack Griffin’s parents when they would cross the bridge into Cape Cod every summer for one month of relief from eleven months of misery. Each of the book’s eleven chapters connects to s...
Oh boy! ohboy ohboy ohboy ohboy... Whenever I give a book five stars and don't write much of a review, you all know that it moved me so much that I don't know what to say. I adore Richard Russo, but have never given any of his books five stars. Partway through the book, I never would have expected...
Perhaps I'm just not the intended audience, but neither the story nor the characters resonated with me. Russo is normally a fantastic writer, but the narrative here was a little too muddled for me to get through without going back to check what had already happened. Richard Russo is one of my favor...
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