Meh. I had never heard of the author, so judged the book it by its great cover--it definitely did not live up to that! However, Kudos to Hamilton for making fun of the non-reading aspiring writers, and for her darkly-humorous portrait of an everyday sociopath (Mrs. Rider). The characters are OK, ...
The best thing about this book is its cover. The story inside, unfortunately, lacks any semblance of the charm or interest excited by the jacket design. For a story that purports to be about writing, it is ironic that the characters are so badly drawn. All three of the main characters in the s...
I must admit, after spotting many negative reviews of this on Goodreads, I was a little wary to read this. This book has been sitting on my shelf for a few years, and I thought I'd give it a try. I ended up really liking this book. It's not the easiest book to read, in regards to its subject matt...
I think Jane Hamilton tried to hard and too often to tie in the title of her book into the story itself. Or maybe it was just glaringly obvious for me since the book I was reading had penciled notes all over and various sentences and passages underlined. You wrote it in pencil! The least you coul...
“It was my mother’s practice to let a tangle work itself out,” attests the admirably square narrator of Jane Hamilton’s novel When Madeline Was Young. In what is billed as a rich and loving story about a nontraditional family, the book follows three generations of the modern-day Maciver clan, sc...
We were eleven and twelve. I couldn’t believe it, the bunk beds ripped apart, the steel web that held his mattress no longer my nighttime ceiling, my sky. He swept up everything he loved in our room, all the Lego embedded in the carpet, every tangled wire, every connector and specialized wrench, ...
Mrs. Gamble suspected the worst the day the family went to Lake Margaret, when she’d crept up to Daniel’s room, and stood outside, six inches from the door, her arms crossed on her chest, listening. She thought she heard a noise, a sizzling sound, like an apple baking in an oven, the thin red ski...