What do You think about Patron Saint Of Liars (2003)?
I hate books like this. Ones that start out so promising, and then crap out halfway through. Like they get lost in the swirl of it all and then just flush themselves down the toilet in despair. At it's most basic, The Patron Saint of Liars is about leaving. The blurb on the back cover of the novel is misleading. It makes it seem like Rose is the main character, when in fact, we lose touch with her halfway through, when she becomes a shadow of the character we've been reading about for 165 pages. It's 1963. She has come to Habit, Kentucky to a home for unwed mothers run by Catholic nuns, because she has found herself pregnant, but unlike the other girls in the home, she's married. She doesn't love her husband, and only truly realized it when she found herself pregnant with his child. So she leaves. She tells no one where she's going and drives halfway across the country. At St. Elizabeth's she falls into a new life, mostly by accident. I very much liked the Rose part of the novel. She was a troubled character, but in the first person POV, she was understandable. Restless. And the book leads you to believe she's found some kind of peace.Until halfway through, when Rose's character loses all coherence. Seen through the two other POVs in the novel, she becomes one of those cliched, disaffected characters who are never satisfied with anything and are constantly leaving and hurting the people they love just because they can't help themselves. I hate these characters. They always seem shallow and self-obsessed when viewed from the outside, and that's definitely what happens here, even though (view spoiler)[the two characters who are the other POVs are her daughter and husband. This is especially maddening, because the first half of the book ends with Rose deciding she wants to keep her baby, to be a mother, and in order to do so, she marries the groundskeeper. Her motives as I read them do not track with her daughter and her husband always complaining that she ignores them or that she's apathetic. I do not understand why Patchett had her make these decisions, only to completley undercut them later in the book and basically ruin Rose's character. (hide spoiler)]
—Ashley
Yeah, so I actually didn't love this book like I was expecting to. It was kind of depressing, and there wasn't an overarching moral lesson or something that made the unhappy ending worth it. Don't get me wroing, I loved Bel Canto, and that didn't end happily either, but I actually thought this story would have been better for a different kind of ending. At least a redemption of sorts. But no luck.My biggest complaint, and this is kind of silly, but I thought the whole point with the healing springs story at the beginning was that the springs were going to heal the protagonists "broken" way of thinking. But we never came back to those springs, which was really confusing to me. Did I just miss something? That's how I felt when I finished, like I had missed something I was supposed to have caught. I'd love for anyone reading this review to clue me in.Secondly, I'm all for people acting selfishly and irrationally if they have their own reasons for it. But I never got a feeling of the protagonist's (sorry, I can't remember her name) reasons for just plain denying herself happiness. It didn't make sense and it was frustrating. If she really had a compulsion to be miserable, her thoughts on the matter should have been laid out better, rather than just watching everyone around her suffer because of her selfish and self-destructive choicesI was going to add more, but those are my major complaints. Un-happy ending, not following through with the foreshadowing, and a stupid protagonist.All that aside, I still gave it 3 stars because there are worse books out there, and it did give me something to think about.
—Danielle
I really, really enjoyed The Patron Saint of Liars. I had previously read Patchett's Bel Canto and wasn't wowed by it, particularly the ending, which I found a little forced. But The Patron Saint of Liars was great. It tells the story of Rose, a young woman who flees her young marriage, and moved to Kentucky, to a home for unwed mothers to give up the baby, and what happens to her in that place. And I just loved it - the characters seemed like real characters, their motivations understandable, and their actions real - and even better, not cliched. I kept worrying that a certain action was going to happen and was so pleased that Patchett trusted her characters (and herself) not to do the absolutely cliched thing. I was particularly impressed by the sense of place that the novel had - it was so grounded in the time period (mid-1960's), and locations (first California, then Kentucky). It just seemed absolutely real, and interesting. I don't know - it's not a book where so much happens, just a snapshot of some ordinary people's lives, but I enjoyed it so much. It is the kind of book that doesn't get the recognition of some of your big name young male writers (your Jonathan Safran Foers, say), but to me, this is a better kind of book than those flashy po-mo novels that get all the press. It actually reminded me of the Virago classics in that way - quiet books that speak truly of human experience. What I am saying is, I guess, that The Patron Saint of Liars really impressed and touched me, and now I want to read the rest of her books.
—Carrie
