Customer Reviews

The Court of Common Pleas

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

 

 

I usually like family stories--where a contemporary family works through real life problems and their relationships with each other and other people. This book didn't make it for several reasons. The most important I think is that the basic premise of a husband nearing retirement age and a wife wanting to start medical school at age 50 was not enough to sustain an entire book. There wasn't enough substance to the conflict set up. I was more interested in the couple's daughters than I ever was in them. The book is also full of pretentious description, with awful and irrelevant similes and metaphors that give me the idea the author is just trying to show how LITERARY she can be. To risk sounding like her, reading the story was like slogging through a lagoon choked with underwater weeds. She uses horrible comparisons, some more than once. Like: [person] used pockets of time like jacket pockets full of wadded up kleenex and loose coins. And: Barges on the Cuyahoga River looked like food making its way through the city's intestinal tract. Yuck! The worst blooper of them all, at least on my copy, is the publisher's blurb, which describes a main character named Anthony Clifford (both on the cover and inside). The main character is named Gregory Brennan. Not even close. What are they doing at Houghton Mifflin, mixing up their own books? I wouldn't recommend this even for a summer read.

The writing style is pedestrian, the characters wooden -- I could hardly bear to read it and gave up about 2/3 of the way through. The story has potential but this novel remains at a Writing 101 level.

I would like to strongly warn anyone against buying this book. The experience of reading this novel for me was at best tedious, and at worst, painful. I'm sure Ms. Marshall believes that she has crafted an insightful, realistic drama but I don't believe that she has accomplished anything admirable in this book. She moves her characters around like puppets, each one "representing" a different type, but completely lacking any personality. One after another, in an endless drone, we hear them whining. I read through to the end, in the vain hope that the story would ultimately prove compelling, but that was definitely not to be the case with this dismal book.

Marshall's writing is as intricate as her revelation of the layers in her character's motivations. I learned a lot from this book about how people evolve in their understanding of both themselves and their mates if they take time and muster the courage to reflect on their impulsive actions and words. Many of the sentences contain kernals wrapped in layers of related ideas, much like the characters themselves. In this era when everybody seems too busy, relationships, especially marriages, are continually in danger of rupturing from inattention and misunderstanding. This book celebrates the rewards of taking time to reconsider, imagine how the situation looks from your spouse's perspective, and learn how to change. It's a beauty.

I'm amazed that earlier reviewers gave this wonderful book such mediocre ratings. I wonder how old they are? As a 67 year old, I found this a glorious book, extremely well written, evoking layers of meaning in life experiences with which I truly resonated. The writing, I thought, was graceful and illuminating, a joy to read and even ponder. The story was riveting, and the characters fully formed, each in a non-caricatrured way, appropriate to their age and stage in life. It was a family story with a firm though somewhat shaken foundation. I loved the humor and the insights and the hard choices facing the characters. I found it a grown up and delightful love story and now I want to read the rest of Alexandra Marshall's books. The reason I bought the book, by the way, is that I read in someone's blog that they had considered this the best novel they had ever read of the intimacy and intricacy of married love. Martha Huntley