Customer Reviews

If I Told You Once

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Judy Budnitz's imagination is wild enough to be exciting but restrained enough to stay focused on the matter at hand. In _If I Told You Once_, she tackles womanhood, adeptly and with amazing insight. Though the characters are harsh and conflicted, both internally and in relationship, their voices are crisp and honest and unapologetically eccentric.

I look forward to Ms. Budnitz's long and fruitful literary career. It's going to be a good one.

I was somewhat disappointed in it, after the stellar heights Flying Leap reached. The magical fairy tale elements were fun and sometimes riveting, especially in the beginning, but the overall telling, the voices employed - for me grew curiously flat over the length of the novel, and seemed somewhat indistinguisable from one another. That weakness in voice was the main drawback - the deadpan delivery often comes up short on reflection and internalization, and finally rendered the story predictable, despite clever plot twists. Reading the stories of Flying Leap, I was constantly startled and amazed by the richness of invention, and here, I was engaged and surprised, but only sporadically, and never to the degree that the short stories acheived. I still enjoyed the book, I just wasn't transported.

IF I TOLD YOU ONCE is a genius work of pure imagination, seamlessly fusing the old world and the new in a stirring epic chronicling three generations of women. Utterly haunting, poignant, and unforgettable.

This novel is a wonderful take-off on old Russian Folk Tales, evoking Gogol at his wildest. It starts off well enough but improves vastly as it moves forward, and eventually resettles the tale in the New World. It is written with wit, compassion, and a wonderfully provocative prose style.

It is a shame that writers with trendy themes, or some sort of artificial hype...get thrust high into the limelight, while true writers, real writers, women and men who will no doubt write until the day they die because telling stories is just in their blood, such as Ms. Budnitz, have to be discovered in the relative shadows.

Ilana yearns to leave the poverty of her Eastern Europeanvillage, to embark on a voyage to the New World...

This is not agentle story of a girl's wandering in the wilderness & hereventual escape, yet there is an innocence, a wonder & aremarkable change in perspective.

A profound transformational workof values, honor, madness & reality. Destined to become a classicin women's literature...

I judged this book by its cover and it paid off. I found it in the stacks of my local library and enjoyed reading it. There were parts of this book that made me actually laugh out loud and other parts of this book that made me wonder if I should keep reading it. I had a hard time sleeping without knowing how the book would end. I HAD to read the rest. I love the generation after generation views and logic each female had in this book. The imagery in If I Told You Once is second to none. It has been a year since I read this book and I can still imagine so many great details that the author described as if I had just read the book last night.

Now I am looking to buy a copy for myself and one copy for my sister.

The somewhat fanciful nature of the violent events in this book serves to soften the blows. It's a story of four generations of women, starting with Ilana. She grows up in an unnamed country (eastern European, according to the book jacket) and emigrates to the U.S. before WWII. Her life reads like a series of dark fairy tales. Her daughter Sashie discounts her mother's stories as total fabrications, reaching her own erroneous conclusions about her mother's history. Given how Sashie chooses her husband and the circumstances of his disappearance, I don't see how she could doubt the occurrences of her mother's life; they're all equally absurd. Sashie's daughter Mara is unbalanced, especially in her attachment to her brother Jonathan. Who wouldn't live in a fantasy world with her lineage? Finally, there's Jonathan's illegitimate daughter Naomi, whose mother dies from burn injuries. Naomi, raised by the other 3 women, comes full circle by connecting mainly with her great-grandmother Ilana. The author quickly disposes of husbands, sons, and brothers, who are secondary characters at best but constant objects of adoration by the women.

I became familiar with Budnitz's short stories through The New Yorker; I fell in love with her delicate, quirky tales told with economy and precision of language. Her expertise and flair seem to lie in shorter narratives versus what she attempted with "If I Told You Once". It's a charming story of growing up in war-era Eastern Europe, coming to America, and the generations linking those experiences. Two other recent novels, "Middlesex" and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," share those plotlines, and, if it weren't for Budnitz's unique writing style, I wouldn't have been as satisfied.

This story was so beautifully written. The similes and metaphors used were extremely effective, and also the fact that there were no quotation marks used. This made it seem more like a story, rather than text written on paper. The voice used for each character was very unique. Each girl a different person, but with similarities in all of them. This was the best book I have ever read in ages. Excellent page-turner.

I absolutely adored this novel. I purchased the book just before going to a book signing of hers in Chicago. I hadn't started reading the book yet, nor had I read her short stories. Now I wish I had because I would have had so much to tell her! The story of Ilana, Sashie, Mara and Nomie made me cry, smile, laugh out loud and scream! It's a magical tale--Budnitz has a tremendous amount of imagination and creativity. Ilana and Shmuel's love story truly gripped me. It wasn't mushy either. There was definitely some bitterness involved. This novel is not your typical "several generations of females" story. It's twisted, bizarre and mysterious. Congratulations on a wonderful novel debut, and I look forward to more of your writing, Judy!