Review: The Awakening by Kate Chopin

I expected The Awakening to be a much longer book. For all of the criticism and banning it gets, I expected it to be a pretty hefty book. Imagine my surprise when I was able to read the entire book in one afternoon. Most of my friends on GoodReads gave it four or five stars so I had high expectations. These expectations were so not met.

 

Title: The Awakening

Author: Kate Chopin

Publication Date: 1899

Publisher: Dover Publications

Pages: 116

Where I Got It: Used Book Store

Dates I Read It: May 12, 2013

Read It For: The Classics Club, 2013 TBR Pile Challenge (October Selection- I do realize it's May...Don't ask), 1001 Book Challenge

Number of Stars: 3/5

The story is Edna Pontellier’s and it begins whilst she is on vacation in Louisiana where she falls in love with Robert. Robert feels the same so he sets off for Mexico since Edna is married and has two children. Edna goes back home to New Orleans where she pines for Robert. Soon her husband goes away on business and sends the children to his mothers. For the first time Edna is able to be on her on with just herself and she’s given plenty of time to consider her life and how she wants it to be. Having found a comfort in this independence she moves from her family home to a smaller one around the corner. She soon takes up with Alcee who is somewhat of the neighborhood player, yet Edna holds her own with him only to come undone after her affair with him. Robert returns to confess his love only to realize this mistake. He then leaves Edna a John Deere letter causing Edna to drown herself at the same beach that she first met Robert.

I did not like this book.  I could not relate to the main character at all, which is unfortunate because I should have been able to fully connect to her as someone who has always craved independence myself. Edna was very unlikable. I wanted desperately to be fond of her, but the character development was exceedingly lacking for me.

It was not just Edna that I did not like; I also did not particularly care for the story. I had a high anticipation for this particular book as there are so many positive reviews, it was banned which is always a plus for any book, it was shocking when first published, it was about a young woman’s sexual awakening- what’s not to love? Well, for starters I did not care for the writing style. I normally like the naturalism approach, yet this one bored me to tears. I personally found that the book was not all that shocking. I kept comparing the book to one of my favorite books dealing with marital infidelity: Anna Karenina. While making this comparison I found Anna to be much more shocking. I felt connected to Anna and Vronsky and Daisy and every single character in Anna, yet I can barely even remember the characters names in The Awakening (and not just because they were French/Creole!). There was not much story to the story. It felt like the book built to a crescendo only to let the reader down in the end. I wanted to feel more remorseful over Edna’s suicide, yet I just didn't care enough about her, or any of the other characters really, to give a damn. I did really like the one part where her husband thought that she was going crazy and got a good chuckle out of that, but that is about it. There was no anticipation to the novel for me. It was a page turner, but only because I wanted it to be over with. If the book were longer, I probably wouldn't have finished it. I did end up giving the book three out of five stars (it was okay) only because of the impact that the novel had on feminism and feminist literature. I’m just grateful that all feminist literature are not like this one. 

Review: The Hours by Michael Cunningham

While I was visiting my parents house the movie version of Michael Cunningham's The Hours came on and I watched the first half of it with my mother. I was thoroughly hooked on the movie, but I knew that I wanted to read the book before I finished the movie so I stopped watching and went off to read whatever book I was reading at the time.
Having been sick and confined to bed all week I was ready for a new read after finishing two in two days. I was in the mood for something serious and I knew that it was time for me to read The Hours. I should have consulted my 2013 TBR Pile list before diving into this book as it was my pick for May of this year, but I was so strongly feeling the urge to read it that I abandoned all thought and read the book in two days in February. Oh well, that frees up May some for me then I suppose.

Title: The Hours
Author: Michael Cunningham
Publication Date: 1999
Publisher: Macmillian/Picador
Pages: 240
Where I Got It: Ed MacKays Used Books, Winston-Salem, NC, July 2012
Dates I Read It: February 7 & 8, 2013
Number of Stars: 5/5
Read For: 2013 TBR Pile Challenge (May Selection, oops); 1001 Books to Read Challenge

The Hours is the story of three women in different eras living their life in one day. First we meet Virginia Woolf, yes, THE Virginia Woolf, on the morning that she begins writing Mrs. Dalloway. Next we meet Clarissa Vaughn living in the late 1990's New York City who is planning a party for her long-time friend, Richard, who is being honored with a distinguished literary award, and finally we meet Laura Brown who only wants to read Mrs. Dalloway and escape from her mundane housewife life in 1950's America. We journey on one day in the lives of each of these ladies much like we journey one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in the novel Mrs. Dalloway. In the end the three lives will interchange and all come together in an act of interconnectedness like no other. If you do not see the shocking connection before the association is revealed, plan to be in for a big surprise.
I got a lot out of this book. Having never read Mrs. Dalloway (though I certainly plan to do so very soon) I was not sure that I would follow along with this novel very well. However, I do know the synopsis of Mrs. Dalloway which did help to understand the mechanisms that Cunningham used to write this novel. The prose is deliciously great. The story as a whole flows like a river pulling the characters (and the reader) along a smooth flowing stream in a day. There is little to no action at all and we mostly get thoughts  descriptions of places and motives, and some dialogue. While this may sound quite prosaic, I assure that it is anything but. Each of the women are struggling with an inner unrest that leaves you wondering what she will choose to do about it.
The characters were astonishingly realistic. Though it's almost impossible to know the exact actions and thoughts that Woolf had during her time at Hogarth House (there is really only so much one can gather from letters), Cunningham does a splendid job of giving life and feeling and depth to Woolf as well as the other two women in the novel. Though there is little character development aside from Laura Brown I felt a sense of belief and trust in these three women. They behaved as women do in their individual dilemmas and they spoke the way I would expect them to and they thought in a manner that was true to their time and person. Even the minor characters like Vanessa (Woolf's sister) and Kitty (Laura's neighbor) and Julie (Clarissa's daughter) were fully formed and believable.
I found no fault with this novel which is very rare for me. I credit as being a great work of fiction and can easily understand how it won the PEN/Faulkner as well as the Pulitzer and the Stonewall.
The video version of the book is currently available on Netflix and I hope to be able to watch it this weekend sometime and do a review of it comparing it to the novel. The first half seemed to follow the book to a T. However, look for a review for that soon and check back for more information on my sister blog which is up and under construction, but not quite ready for me to say "go to this great new blog I've got, you won't be disappointed" yet.

Review: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was my January book from my 2013 TBR Pile Challenge as well as being a book on my Classics Club Challenge List.

Growing up in the South and reading and relating to a story like To Kill A Mockingbird is what I believe little girl readers did in the North with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The book is a coming of age tale of precocious Francie Nolan who is eleven years old in 1912 and is as poor as is expected of any immigrant family in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn. The novel follows Francie and her family from 1912 to 1916.

Title: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Author: Betty Smith
Publication Date: 1943
Pages: 483
Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers
Where I Got It: The School Library I Work In
Dates I Read It: January 5 - January 18, 2013
Number of Stars: 5/5



I loved this book. I was smitten with Francie from page one and I didn't stop loving her despite her awkward adolescent years and her sometimes frustrating choices. Picking up the book was never a chore for me and I often found myself longing to be curled up on my couch with my friend Francie. I loved each character in this story despite not being able to relate to a single one of them (except, of course, Francie). I love a good Immigrant story and that's exactly what this is. Francie and her brother Neely are second generation Americans living in Brooklyn born of an Irish Father and an Austrian mother. The family is dirt poor as the father is a drunkard and the mother works entirely too hard for a woman to provide for her family and invents games to play when there is literally no food in the house for weeks at a time. I kept picturing Francie as a young Sophia Petrillo as the only previous notions I had of Brooklyn came from Sophia's character on the television show The Golden Girls and her frequent rants about the old days which started with "Picture it, Brooklyn, 1912.."
The story is very much character-driven and there is little to no action in the entire book. It is about the day to day lives of American families doing their best to survive in war time (WWI breaks out two years into the book while Francie is working for a newspaper company) with no money and difficult jobs. I read this book for almost two weeks and one evening Geoff asked me about it saying that a friend of his read it in high school and hated it. It would be a difficult read for a boy as there is no action and it is the story of a girl coming of age. However, as a girl who came of age (albeit not in the early 1900s), I could relate a lot to the struggles of Francie and I could easily sympathize with several life moments that she had to go through during the course of the novel. Things like losing a first love, death, the loss of dreams and hopes and the fact that women are at a disadvantage to men, especially in areas like education and the workplace.
Betty Smith does have a knack for writing and I had serious suspicions that this was more memoir than fiction for her. After I finished the book this morning (thank goodness for a teacher workday that I opted out of) I went online to read about Ms. Smith and discovered that most people believe that this was the story of her own coming of age. The emotions were so true and she was able to capture a moment perfectly that it would be very surprising if the events of the novel were not something that she had lived through herself.
The novel caused me to both laugh out loud and cry, especially the ending. I found myself being nostalgic for my youth more than usual while reading this book, much like a grown-up Francie does at the end of the novel. I don't want to ruin the ending, but Francie leaves us on a high note with recaptured hopes for her future, which in turn made me reevaluate my own future and have hopes that perhaps I, too, could one day recapture some dreams I once had but forgot due to the pressures of bills and the day to day grind of life.