Customer Reviews

At The Breakers: A Novel (Kentucky Voices)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I did enjoy a lot of it. This book was definitely worth the time to read and I found myself picking it up again very easily each time. It's not complex but I don't think it falls into the chick-lit category either. Glad I read it but I don't feel a great need to recommend it to friends.

The main character is a forty-two year old woman who has 4 children, giving birth to the first child when she was 15 years old. That event is the defining moment in the book that sets everything else into motion. Married young to the father and giving birth to a second child, the marriage predictably falls apart and she moves on to other marriages and other children continually making bad choices and struggling with the enormous task of raising four children on her own with minimal family support and trying to finish her own education. Part of me felt very sympathetic with the character and part of me kept thinking that she was making one bad decision after the next and largely causing her own continuing problems.

While an interesting and quick read, there are some very real problems with the book that keep it from being as good as it could have been.

1) the cast of characters is just too large -- even major characters seemed to be left too two-dimensional

2) there were some very unrealistic situations -- how many parents are going to really send their 14-year-old, pregnant daughter across the country with her equally young husband to live and have a baby with no financial support? They couldn't legally even sign the contract on their apartment, couldn't drive, would even have difficulty getting jobs due to child labor laws but none of this ever is addressed.

3) some events that appear to have deep meaning are never explained. There is an entire sequence where one of the daughters shows up unexpectedly for Christmas and a whole collection of Christmas gifts are retreived from Jo's (the main character) room for her including a painting. The painting mysteriously appears, is described as so significant in her life (even though we have never heard of it before), is given to the daughter who immediately grasps the emotional support being bestowed upon her throught the giving of the gift. After that the painting disappears never to be referenced again. This happens multiple times where things just show up and then the story-line is dropped.

The bottom line on this is that it's good, but not great. As the author continues to develop (and the quality of the editing improves) this author has a lot of potential to write really outstanding books -- this one just isn't quite there yet.

At the Breakers by Mary Ann Taylor-Hall appealed to me because the protagonist is a single mother, leaving a difficult relationship, seeking refuge in her new job at renovating a hotel, while finally giving herself to explore her dreams of being a writer. For all intents and purposes, I should have loved Jo Sinclair and I kept hoping I would. When in the first chapter she doesn't call the police as she should . . . nor in the second .. . or third, I was prepared to throw the book across the room.

Perhaps I should have but the truth this is not a badly written book. If you like Lifetime movies or preferred the movie version of Under the Tuscan Sun to the memoir then you'll probably like this book. Woman leaves a bad situation and tries to salvage her life and the lives of her children while also trying to find herself. Of course there is a romantic interest and another possible one to complicate the inevitable one. It is all so predictable that I knew how it would end by the end of the third chapter.

The writing is adequate but there are flaws that keep this from being a well written book. Too predictable and peopled with characters who stay on the page rather than leaping from them and into the reader's heart, this is a quickly read and forgotten novel. But if you don't like or feel a great deal of sympathy for Jo Sinclair by the end of the first few chapters you won't feel any by the end of the book. I know I didn't.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I was frustrated, while reading the novel, that obvious errors were not caught. Disneyworld is in Florida, not California. And when I read that Jo gave Victor a pocket watch I was utterly baffled. Not once had this pocket watch been mentioned prior to its magical appearance and yet she managed to not only get his pocket watch from his possession to have it repaired but she did so while living in a different state! Not once does Taylor-Hall hint at this gift prior to its manifestation, let share with the reader that Jo has a gift for Victor in mind. She just seems to drop the watch onto the page and presume that the reader will take the whole back story on faith, I suppose. I'm still trying to figure out how she managed to get the watch from him without his noticing.

Another example of almost the same thing occurs when Erica, her middle daughter, arrives for Christmas with no warning. Jo, not expecting Erica's visit, has no gifts for the girl. She sees a painting on the wall and the reader gets to hear all about how Jo found and bought the painting, etc. Naturally she wraps this painting up and gives it to Erica. A better way to present the painting to the reader would have been to have Jo hang it up as soon as her room was painted and ready for her to move into, have the back story shared in that earlier chapter. Then, when Jo makes the decision to give the painting to her daughter, the reader would have a better appreciation of it's intimacy and importance. As it is, the painting is thrown on the wall just in time for Jo to give it to her daughter. It's rather like Chekhov's mandate that if there's a knife on the wall in the first act it had better be used by the third--only in reverse where a knife appears by the third act where no knife was before.

These details, along with the predictability and poorly realized characters kept this novel from being anything more than adequate. It's a shame. I think the author has the ability to write better but I don't think I have the patience to read anything else she's read to ascertain if my intuition is correct or not.

This book tries to be literary and tries to explore the difficulties inherent in the mother-daughter relationship. The needs of each conflicting, and both sides of the story.

The main character is just a sad sack without a lot to recommend her. She's made a lifetime of bad choices, lived a sad life and passed the same on to her kids in various, uninteresting ways. Overall the story is sad and dull, and lacking in character vibrancy or sympathy.

In the end I was left with a "so what?" feeling. I suppose the mother's final decision is supposed to be somehow redeeming or at least hopeful but for me the story lacked any real conflict or resolution. It was just an ongoing drone of sadness.

I did not read this book as part of a book club, but I should have. It has just the right amount of page turning to keep every type of reader involved, but enough character growth and thoughtful aspects to fuel a good discussion. Telling the story of a 40-something, single mother of 4, who is simultaneously looking back on her life and looking forward, this book considers many questions: How responsible are parents for how their children's lives turn out? Can parents yearn for a life they want, or must they give that up for their children? How do we learn to live with the choices we make?

At The Breakers had well-developed characters, and a nice sense of place, plus a few quirky characters thrown in for good measure. This author was new to me, but I was glad for the introduction and the world she invited me into for a couple days. Overall, this book was very enjoyable vacation read.

At the Breakers is a wonderfully well-written novel.
It is full of unexpected life experiences , self-doubt,
emotional turmoil and hard-earned times of happiness and
painful self-discovery by the main character, Jo, and her four children.
I was completely absorbed by Jo's story, and I felt great empathy for her
as a mother who had to begin caring for her first child while still a teenager.
Jo unwittingly carries over a lack of engagement with her
third daughter, Wendy, due most likely to her own experiences
as a child, and then as a teen parent. It was a potent and convincing
reminder of how generations of families can be affected by such events in
their own lives. Jo's resilience, and that of all her children, in the
living of a transient and relationally chaotic life with a series of
surrogate fathers was the powerful introductory grounding of the story for me.
The support of some women friends, the camaraderie that
she develops as she works with the owner and the residents of The Breakers Hotel,
and the relationship that she eventually allows herself to have
evolves the story of Jo's life, and those of her children into one of trust and hope.
I recommend it highly.

Jo Sinclair is a forty-something single mother of four, who basically lost her own childhood and never reclaimed it when she became pregnant and got married (the proper Catholic thing to do ) when she was just 14.

Several mismatched partners later, and a true magnet for the wrong men, Jo is brutally attacked, beaten and even raped by her live-in boyfriend. She flees with her 13 year old son and what's left of her pride to the Jersey shore, where she happens upon an old hotel in the process of being re opened and in need of a painter.

Seeking a combination of comfort, escape, and solitude by the sea, Jo asks for a job as painter and hoping that she and her son now have someplace that at the very least offers the illusion of safety. The hopeful yet a bit leary business owner Irv accepts her into the hotel and she begins the hotel's renovation that in time comes to represent her own inner growth towards newfound strength and transformation.

At the Breakers moved me emotionally the way that most good books do.

It bored me a little in the middle but left me with a very satisfactory ending. It was nice to see hard working Jo get what she always needed and thought she wanted. I also liked to witness her finally beginning to analyze just what is considered a healthy partner in her life and one that would eventually lead her down familiar paths.I liked that she took her time and questioned herself on who and what situations she could really trust. This kept her character very real and human to me.

I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a glimpse into abuse because it is still a tabu subject that I think needs to be brought out into the open (even if only through fiction) to be understood.

Imagine that you'd had a very difficult life, marred by men's need to own your physical beauty, too many children from too many fathers, and the patchwork way you have had to piece together an education after leaving school to marry at fourteen. Imagine an inexplicably brutal transformation on the part of the man you love that leaves you wounded. Then, imagine that life comes along and hands you everything you have ever wanted at once.

This book provides it all, for Jo. A great metaphorical healing experience, accomplished through painting rooms in different hues. A tawny-eyed beautiful young man who prowls around, wanting her and reminding her that she's still got it, baby. An older suitor who can offer her exactly the kind of life and entre into the world of literary ideas that she was denied, due to her abrupt entry into parenthood.

But of course Jo can have this stuff! She's bewitchingly beautiful, apparently ageless, breathlessly charming, physically strong enough to repaint an entire hotel in a matter of weeks, brilliant, educated, and so naturally full of taste that she can assemble a pile of exquisite gifts from rummage sales and the Goodwill, and decorate a hotel with one fetchingly weathered hand tied behind her back.

That's the story of Jo Sinclair. It will either answer your most profound needs as a reader for escape, amusement, pathos and righting every wrong, or you will be somewhat nonplussed by how tidy it all is, under the ruse of family sprawl. It depends on what you want out of a book; realism or the tidy satisfaction of everything coming out right.

That being said, this writer has a gift for a haunting turn of phrase, she invests her family dynamics with a great deal of humor and realism, and she's gifted at conveying the physical presence of characters. I think this book is the right kind of read for the right kind of reader. It just all got a little too contrived for me by the end, as evinced by the over-the-top emotional absurdity of the final "occasion." Enough already, you know? But other readers might appreciate all the fantastical wish-fulfillment.

I was looking forward to this novel, it sounded different from what I normally pick up--maybe Chick Lit for the more "mature" crowd (the main character and I being 40-something...). Honestly, I am not sure if this would actually be considered Chick Lit; for one thing, the main character seemed to be doing and awful lot of whining and feeling sorry for herself--as did her daughters.

Without giving a complete synopsis of this novel, the main character Jo Sinclair, has become a victim of her poor choices, starting with a pregnancy at age 14. A sheltered Catholic school girl, her appalled parents marry her off to the boy and send her far away from her New Jersey home to California. Of course, this ends badly. This action seems to be the catalyst for all the characters in the novel unhappiness, including Jo's children, but especially her two middle children, Erica, a typical late 1990's 20-something woman (self-absorbed, obsessed with being with a man) and 18 year old Wendy, who at 14 was a runaway, and is now living as a squatter in NYC. Jo has been divorced three times and doesn't seem to realize when she should say "no."

Suffice it to say, the drama begins when Jo has yet another problem with a man in her life and runs away to hide from him, uprooting her 13 year old son and sending shock waves through her dysfunctional family. Lots of drama and two more possible lovers appear for the rest of the novel, which I found to be about 75 pages longer than necessary.

I don't want to say this was a terrible book--I'm sure it has an audience--and I have said it before--I may not be the target audience here. But I found myself quite bored with the repetitive ruminations and agonies of Jo and her borderline obsessive behavior with her children--especially Wendy--and with her need to have a man in her life to make her "complete" and happy. What this family truly needs is a good psychotherapist.

If you like Jodi Picoult, you will probably like this somewhat predictable and formulaic novel.

I got this book given the author's accolades and I thought it would be a nice break from what I usually read. I found the voice inconsistent. At times the writing was beautiful, at times it felt forced. The book does a good job at getting inside the life of the protagonist, but I felt that the main male character -- the poetry professor with whom she has a less than charged relationship -- was flat, and that reduced the story for me. I just couldn't understand what he saw in her, and so instead he seemed more of a foil or a symbol of her life's journey. Much of the time when reading the story I was just happy that so much drama was not in my life. I was glad to experience the emotional turmoil remotely, but it also made me very happy that I'm not dating someone like those in the story, and the struggle the main character has in overcoming innate attraction with certain people is interesting in that regard (and hence a warning to myself).

A bit too much soap opera and not enough opera for my tastes.

I loved this book and highly recommend it. It's a great story with great characters, and once I started it I couldn't put it down until I finished it. The main character has had a life full of problems, beginning with pregnancy and a shotgun wedding at age 15, but she never quits trying to make a better life for herself and her four children. Although many of her problems are of her own making, she is often the victim of circumstances beyond her control, but she eventually finds herself with a chance at a better life than she could possibly imagine, if she'll chance it.

This is a story that gives its reader a good emotional workout, including anger, sadness and hope, but it's also good for a chuckle or two. I don't believe you're likely to find a funnier dysfunctional family Thanksgiving anywhere in literature than the one in this book.