Review: The Interestings

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Kudos to Lisa for recommending another great book to me. I really enjoyed this...it's about six friends who attend an arts summer camp together as teenagers, and their relationships for the next 20+ years of their lives. It was especially fun to read this while on my summer vacation, although to call it a trashy summer read would be to minimize the compelling writing.

All six characters in this book were well-conceived although not all given equal airtime in the story. Jules is at this camp on scholarship, from the suburbs. Noah is the son of a famous folk singer. Ash and Goodman are siblings, raised in Manhattan. Ethan is a dorky but talented cartoonist. And Cathy is a dancer whose body is not cut out for it.

What was best about the construction of the book was how Wolitzer would follow one of the characters for a few chapters, then catch up with another one. It wasn't done in an exact rotation, but it wasn't haphazard either - when you had to know something new about one of the characters, she flipped to them.

The story itself was predictable - not in that I knew what would happen, but in that there were lovers, marriages, illnesses, and betrayals. The kind of saga that Messud's Emperor's Children wanted to be.

This was one I was sad to see end.



View all my reviews

Review: Caleb's Crossing

Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This is another I got from Mom's list. It was pretty good - I enjoyed Brooks' other books (Year of Wonder and People of the Book) and this did not disappoint.

The story is based on a real character - Caleb - the first American Indian to attend Harvard. But the rest of the story is imagined by Brooks, and told through the eyes of Bethia, a young woman whose father is a missionary minister on Martha's Vineyard in the mid-1600's. Bethia befriends Caleb and ultimately follows him to Cambridge, although under much different circumstances than her own matriculation into Harvard.

I was fascinated by this story taking place on the Vineyard, partially because a close friend had lived there for the past few years. I liked reading about the relationship between the missionaries and the Native Americans, and found Bethia an honest and likeable narrator.

Like much historical fiction, this book didn't have the happiest of endings, but the story itself was a good read.



View all my reviews

Review: The Invisible Bridge

The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



My mom recommended this book to me and it was fabulous! WOW. My only regret is not reading it last year when I was in both Paris and Budapest, the book's two main settings. Totally a first-world problem.

This book follows the story of Andras Levi, a Hungarian Jew who moves to Paris to attend architecture school. His younger brother stays in Budapest, while his older brother moves to Italy to become a doctor. He and his brothers all face challenges as the Nazi party and its anti-Semitism become increasingly stronger in the 1930's and then WWII breaks out.

Andras' story is followed most closely, and also revolves around the relationship he has with a family in Budapest and their estranged daughter in Paris. But various love interests and life event for the brothers are chronicled as well.

While I found the first quarter of the book a little tedious, with a love interest that was on-again off-again to an extreme degree, the rest of the book was enthralling. I had a hard time putting it down, and couldn't wait to see what happened next. I was also interested in learning about the fate of Hungarian Jews during WWII, tragic but different from that of much of the rest of Europe.



View all my reviews