10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
dripping with sentimentality, July 4, 2008
First let me say that I only finished this book because I was listening to it on CD and was on a long car ride with nothing else to listen to. Otherwise I would have abandoned it after chapter 2.
The first half of this book contains two things: first, hype about some secret announcement that will be made "tomorrow" and that will change everyone's lives and that nothing will be the same again and just you wait until tomorrow, oh boy! Second, is a very long and very detailed memoir-style retelling of the narrator's meeting and falling in love with her husband; her father's falling in love with her mother; her husband's father falling in love with her father's mother; there is even an entire chapter about her husband's father's brother. It goes on and on, all interspersed with the narrator's mawkish fawning over her two children, which gets so repetitive and syrupy that you just know the kids would have walked away before the end of the story.
Oh, and there are funerals. If you like descriptions of funerals, you're in for a treat.
The second half of this book is just one big huge let-down after the hype built up in the first. The actual announcement left me wondering what the big deal was. And there are still many anticlimactic pages left after it is made.
This book is cringeworthy not only for its dripping sentimentality, but also for the detailed description of the narrator's sex life as she drones to her two 16-year-old children. No child wants to know how skilled his father is in bed, or what position her parents were in during some particularly passionate session of lovemaking. At times the author seems to recognize this and has the narrator say things like, "I know you don't want to know this about your mother, but..." and "cover your ears because this is really gonna be gross..." which does nothing to make the following discussion any more believable.
In short, don't start reading this book. It has little to offer besides sentimentality about love and death, two topics which are not nearly as novel as the author seems to thingk. And once you get that dose of hype and start wondering about the mysterious revelation to come "tomorrow," you're going to be let down, big time. And from all of the excessive sentimentality, you'll still be cringing--tomorrow.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"I'm the only one awake in this house on this night before the day that will change all our lives.", September 22, 2007
(3.5 stars) It is 1995, and Paula Campbell Hook is lying awake in bed on the eve of a dramatic announcement which she and her husband Mike will make to their sixteen-year-old twins. They have delayed this life-changing occasion for several years, having decided to wait until after the twins, Nick and Kate, have celebrated their sixteenth birthday, fearful that they might be "wrenching [them] forever from [their] childhood." In the course of the night, Paula reminisces about her past, her thirty-year relationship with Mike, her wedding, the marriages of their parents and their parents' histories, the deaths of family members, the childhoods of the twins, and the concept of love across three generations.
Throughout the novel, Paula contrasts her present life and that of the twins with the lives of her parents and Mike's parents, showing how each person's expectations for the future grow out of his/her upbringing, relationships with those who love them, and the historical period in which s/he happens to live. Paula's meditations are conversational and very intimate, sometimes revolving around the sexual freedom she and Mike experienced, separately and together, in the sixties. While her personal confessions may be more than she ever actually plans to discuss with the twins (and it is certainly more than the twins need to know), they do add to the developing themes for the reader, preparing him/her for the announcement which is the crux of the novel.
Swift deliberately ignores two of the canons of fiction writing in order to relate Paula's story. First of all, he writes (surprisingly effectively) as a woman--sharing all a woman's intimacies, points of view, and attitudes. Because the entire novel is an interior monologue, however, he ends up telling about the action, instead of recreating it in lively scenes. This almost works, since Paula is a character who reveals every thought, every emotion, and every aspect of her life to the reader, no matter how personal, but this also makes some of her monologue feel unnatural and the "telling about" of the events somewhat tedious.
The reader discovers the nature of the dramatic announcement with one hundred pages left in the novel, and while it may be difficult for the family to deal with, it is not a unique situation, nor is it something that will necessarily change life for the family as much as Paula thinks it will. As a result, the remainder of the novel feels anticlimactic, and it ends as it begins, with Paula still the only one awake. Graham Swift takes a lot of chances with structure in this novel, and he almost succeeds. The novel has many fine qualities, but its revelations ultimately seem contrived, instead of inevitable. n Mary Whipple
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Yikes, even I couldn't finish this book, July 24, 2008
I'm the person who sits to the very end of even horrible movies, hoping it will redeem itself in the end. I can't remember the last book I began and didn't finish. I came to Amazon this morning after getting halfway through this book to see if it was "just me". Glad to see others found it equally tedious. The "big secret" is really annoying, and fairly easy to "guess". The tedium of the writing put me to sleep and kept me checking ahead to see if it ever got better as the book went on, it appears not to. Alas...I have given up!
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