THAT was a waste of time. True, I was astounded again at Tyler's ability to make absolutely quotidian duty sound thrilling, but 60 pages from the end, it never broached its alleged topic and never would. Hitchcock famously said that if you show a bomb in the first scene, it has to go off by the end,...
Aaron and Dorothy married against objections from his family and friends, but he loved her. When a tree crashes through the roof of their home and kills Dorothy, those family and friends do not know how to reach out to Aaron as he grieves. Aaron’s family owns a publishing company specializing in “...
The Beginner's Goodbye is a real return to form for Anne Tyler. Fans of her writing will be delighted to see so many of her signature tropes dusted off and given a new lease of life. There's the socially inept protagonist, his domineering sister who secretly begins dating one of his acquaintances, t...
What a nice book! Anne Tyler creates characters who make you reflect upon your own life. I walked away remembering why I love my husband and appreciate my marriage so much. More than a novella about grief, the simple prose allows you to join in on Aaron's journey and reflect on how you might be i...
Anne Tyler's writing is so smooth and effortless. This would be a good in-between book, sandwiched by challenging or lengthy or exhilarating reads. It helps to recalibrate some internal reading set point. This reminded me a lot of The Accidental Tourist. The same type of male character, similar circ...
Tyler knows how to write not just about ordinary people, but ones who are flawed, so that we see their flaws through them far more vividly than the people around them. This short novel focuses on loss and mourning and if there are things we find hard to believe that can become believable in certain ...
This novel is like a placid pond where the calm surface shows little of the depth of activity beneath. A simple, elegant story about a man existing in the year after his wife's death. I say "existing" because Tyler's protagonist is very slow to contemplate or to let us know his feelings about virt...
On a day when his office-mates send him home, ill with a cold, Aaron Woolcott's wife, Dorothy, arrives home unexpectedly early too. After an argument, over something silly, she is killed in a terrible accident. A tree that has been consistently checked for its safety, falls on their house. Aaron is...
I like Anne Tyler's books - I like her writing style, I like the fact that she writes about somewhat quirky but still ordinary people. I liked this book - but it didn't grab me in such a way that it was a 4 or 5 star read. The characters were okay, the plot was okay, the book never left me thinking...
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