Customer Reviews

Iron Shoes: A Novel

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Here we have a 40-ish female whose life seems perfectly nice. Married, nice part-time job, friends and family, lives in a beautiful part of the country, cute little boy, saucy empowering best friend. Look closer: marriage going downhill fast, job about to be eliminated, and her parents!!! Hag-ridden by a truly monstrous, alcoholic, sharp-as-a-razor mother - but the mother is dying, and the mother is deeply loved. She has her faults, but she is your mother. Remote, sarcastic, alcoholic father - but the father is also deeply loved. Who doesn't want the love and approval of Daddy? Born-again, weak, bible thumping brother - but you can't hate him, he came from the same place you did! Uncommunicative, secretive husband, downing health potions, distancing himself more every day - well, some things you may be unable to fix. Sounds awful, but Ms. Giles makes all of this both hilarious and tragic. You will laugh and you will cry. There are tons of stories about women and their midlife crises out there (including the paragon, "Diary of a Mad Housewife"), and as the midlife crisis is a perennial subject, many of the stories have a sameness to them. Worries about growing older, about a failing marriage, thoughts of having an affair to affirm that you are still attractive and desirable, and the looming realization that parents are not going to be here all that much longer. The looming realization that you can, yes, you can grow stronger and take charge of your own life and for once make yourself happy. Facing the death and decline of your parents, no matter how lousy they were - they are dear to you and no matter how old you are, you want their love and approval as much as when you were six years old. Ms. Giles takes all of these elements of the same old story and writes beautifully, making it a joy to read. You have to shake your head at our frazzled heroine, tell her to grow up, to get a grip, at the same time you want to hug her. Hey, it's easy to sneer at this middle aged child-woman, but she spent her whole life with two monsters and she can't just change overnight. But there are definite signs of hope at the end of this book, and you cheer for her. As in many stories of this type, the setting is in an upper middle class town: money is no problem, at least for the parents, which may make the heroine's life easier. She doesn't have to worry about Medicare or Meals on Wheels or home aides - the dying mother is draped in mink and diamonds and there is a loyal, hard working housekeeper pitching in. But death and dying is never easy, especially when there's so much you want to hear, or say, and time is running out. I just loved this book, it is very well done of its type, it has dark humor , bitterness, despair, anguish, wit, and hope. I finished Iron Shoes this morning and put it aside genuinely sorry to see it end.

Molly Giles is an excellent SHORT story writer , and after reading her previous story collections ( Rough Translations and Creek Walk), I really looked forward to this first novel. WRONG. Iron Shoes is a s-t-r-e-c-h-e-d out short story and should be, at most,a short novel within a short story collection. The pace is slow, like a snails ,or even slower at times. I question the need for the inclusion of some characters ,who just take up space on the page , and are not needed for the thin storyline.

Kay Sorenson,age 40,has problems...most that have been around for a long long time such as her prissy second husband,not interested father,and lack of self-worth ( OH MY ,we could see this coming)as manifested in a tiny job,tiny house, and tiny life driven by unresolved guilt, unwarrented fear and the need for,in my opinion , a kick-start to the rear. Ida, her Drama Queen mother, is the reason I kept reading this book. I wanted to know about what outrageous , self-centered (but with true DQ style ) thing she would say or do next.Ida was the only character with ( some irony here)some LIFE in her! Kay needs to GROW UP, and I felt cheated that it took 239 pages for her to take a few toddler's steps toward this goal.

Get Molly Giles short story collections--- even in hardback , but I would advise waiting for the paperback of Iron Shoes, if you are still determined to read it!

When I first started reading this book, I thought, oh, my, these people are all a mess! Some of the ridicule and constantly demeaning situations Kay, the main character, tollerates, are just over the top. However, she tugs at your heart because she is obviously a big, messy, loving woman whose big heartedness is taken for granted by all around her. She drinks too much, smokes too much, and does too much, but who wouldn't with a family like this? When she finally begins to take ahold of her life, kicks the awful husband out and stops drinking, you know that she is on the road to discovery. Nothing momentous, but something profound. The author says that this is a comedy about alcoholism and dying, but it is not. There are sharply funny moments, but this is not a funny book.

The characters in this book start out just a little too bizarre. We have a mother without legs; a husband who just seems AWFUL, a friend who fixes lamb tongues for a funeral, and a main character who seems to spend all of her time drinking and smoking and anguishing over what seem to be the many things that are wrong with her life. Fortunately,the book starts fast, and the characters get very real very quickly, and the bizarre book turns into a good account of a middle-aged woman who is a helper by nature and has always lived in the shadow of her very successful parents. By the end of the book, you can tell that she is finally coming out of those shadows and is eventually going to get it together and get on with her life on her own terms.

I started this book a couple of evenings ago and was so excited, talking about it in work the next day, how wonderful it was! Somehow over the next couple of reading sessions I started losing my enthusiasm for the story. Ida was a pip indeed! Kay was a bit pathetic but I still had hope for her. Her father, Francis, was despicable, her husband Neal was an irritating, uninteresting whimp. Thankfully, she had her friend Zabeth, who was an absolute hoot! These characters were all so enjoyable at first, but as the story progressed it seemed to drag and become bland, I can't quite put my finger on it. I do see great talent here and would like to read some of Ms. Giles' short stories. Perhaps this book would've been better as a short story and there just wasn't enough material here to keep my interest peaked?! In any case, not a bad read at all, it "grabbed" me initially, but let go somewhere in the middle.

Finally I book that I finished in less than 2 days! What made me tear through this book was the wide array of characters. They were so different, yet pulled together by the author like pieces of a puzzle (with Kay as the border holding them all together somehow). You love something about each - and that can be hard to say with a dragonlady like Ida at the wheel! For a relatively short book, many things happened within its pages, with an ending that was all tied up - but let's say not in a "neat little bow"...awesome read!

A terrific book about a woman finding herself, freeing herself from pleasing very strong parents. A dead marriage, a fantasy about marrying a man she's never talked with. You find yourself reading rapidly, to learn if she and the new man connect, to see if she can shake her submission as her mother dies and her father ... what goes on between her and her father the night of the wake? A little ambiguous, but she wakes up in her parents house, where she's been alone with her father, naked, a trail of clothes across the floor. You cheer for her, pray for her, hope for her. And also want to shake her, wake her, urge her into independence, to find her strength, there underneath all the while. What about the artist on the bicycle who stops by the library where she works?

Read this, you'll like her while you also want to shout at her.

This author really knows how to draw readers into the emotions of the characters. The use of humility and self-preservation (or really self-perserverance) with the woman really hit home with this reader. It is often hard to find strong, independent women characters in fiction, without sex being a apart of the equation. Molly Giles creates this character in Iron Shoes. This book sets the standard for my future fiction selections.

This is my first Molly Giles and, based on my experience with "Iron Shoes," not my last. Each chapter of this short, thorough novel reads like a short story. Not a moment is wasted and most are packed with insight into these sad, stuck characters. "Iron Shoes" never suffers from its subject matter and is, in Giles' words, a comedy. In every sense. I appreciated the "study guide" in the back and the author's notes were a welcome treat.

Middleaged Kay has spent her entire life trying to please parents who are incapable of caring about anybody but themselves. Ida and Francis are so completely selfabsorbed and destructive that they have no business being parents. Ida has competed with her daughter for every scrap of positive attention and she has managed to controll everything in Kay's life. However, although this is hinted at by Kay's female friend, it is never conceptionalized. Very little changes after Ida's death and I had to wonder what the point was. The writing is pretty good and I found it fairly humorous but was so frustrated by the sense that Kay is NEVER going to get it.