kittybrat
New Member
"A Home at the End of the World" by Michael Cunningham
Has anyone read this book?
I hate reading halfway through a book and not finishing it. It took me a few months to get through it (a combination of being busy and the book being slightly boring), and toward the end, I was forcing myself to get to the end. I ended up skipping one shorter chapter at the end because (a) the book is very repetative any how (as each chapter is a different person's point of view, and they often overlap) and (b) the chapter I skipped was being told from the character I hated.
There were 4 characters telling stories: Bobby, Jonathan, Alice and Clare. Bobby and Jonathan were good characters - strong, realistic and believable. Alice was also realistic and believable, probably moreso if you were a wife/mother in the 60s and 70s as she was (I wasn't, so I can't relate too well to her life). Clare, on the otherhand, might have been realistic, but she was a total (excuse my language) bitch. She's starts off as a mid-30s woman who thinks she's still in her early 20s, living with Jonathan as he goes to college and, eventually, starts a job at a newspaper. She was fine at this point, though I felt her personality was slightly pathetic and weird. Once Bobby was brought into it, it was a whole other story. She took his virginity in the most morbidly awkward, off-color way, then, when they started having a relationship, her personality headed into one of a self-centered 6 year old crossed with an old bag of a woman. It was rather annoying to read her chapters.
The problem I had with Alice was only toward the end, after Ned died. Ned gave Jonathan explicit instructions on how to take care of him after he passed away, and once he did, it was... I think months before Alice called Jonathan back down to Arizona to collect the ashes - an act she did only because she started dating someone else and thought having her ex-husband's ashes around would be abnormal and morbid. Besides that, she tried convincing Jonathan to disobey the requests of his dying father and explaining that it doesn't matter what he wanted, because, after all, he was just a man and he was dead. That doesn't seem realistic - at least not after reading the first half of the book and getting to know Alice then. It seemed rather out of her character.
I had no real problems with the boys, except for when Jonathan became a drama queen and took off from Bobby and Clare because of the jealousy he had with their relationship. The only reason they reconnected was because Ned died and they all went to the funeral. Still, it's something that I could believe he would do, if he were a real person, so my only negativity toward that would be the same as if a friend of mine had done that, not because it wasn't well-written.
Overall, the book started out GREAT. I was recommending it to people even half-way through. But when I felt the need to skip a chapter (and, surprise surprise - I didn't feel like I missed anything) and was saying to myself, "alright, just get through the rest of it and you can put it down forever," I stopped singing its praises.
I still, however, will check out the movie, because I found out about that first, and when I realized it was after a book, I felt it right to read it before watching. I think I might enjoy the movie even though I didn't enjoy the book.
Has anyone read this book?
I hate reading halfway through a book and not finishing it. It took me a few months to get through it (a combination of being busy and the book being slightly boring), and toward the end, I was forcing myself to get to the end. I ended up skipping one shorter chapter at the end because (a) the book is very repetative any how (as each chapter is a different person's point of view, and they often overlap) and (b) the chapter I skipped was being told from the character I hated.
There were 4 characters telling stories: Bobby, Jonathan, Alice and Clare. Bobby and Jonathan were good characters - strong, realistic and believable. Alice was also realistic and believable, probably moreso if you were a wife/mother in the 60s and 70s as she was (I wasn't, so I can't relate too well to her life). Clare, on the otherhand, might have been realistic, but she was a total (excuse my language) bitch. She's starts off as a mid-30s woman who thinks she's still in her early 20s, living with Jonathan as he goes to college and, eventually, starts a job at a newspaper. She was fine at this point, though I felt her personality was slightly pathetic and weird. Once Bobby was brought into it, it was a whole other story. She took his virginity in the most morbidly awkward, off-color way, then, when they started having a relationship, her personality headed into one of a self-centered 6 year old crossed with an old bag of a woman. It was rather annoying to read her chapters.
The problem I had with Alice was only toward the end, after Ned died. Ned gave Jonathan explicit instructions on how to take care of him after he passed away, and once he did, it was... I think months before Alice called Jonathan back down to Arizona to collect the ashes - an act she did only because she started dating someone else and thought having her ex-husband's ashes around would be abnormal and morbid. Besides that, she tried convincing Jonathan to disobey the requests of his dying father and explaining that it doesn't matter what he wanted, because, after all, he was just a man and he was dead. That doesn't seem realistic - at least not after reading the first half of the book and getting to know Alice then. It seemed rather out of her character.
I had no real problems with the boys, except for when Jonathan became a drama queen and took off from Bobby and Clare because of the jealousy he had with their relationship. The only reason they reconnected was because Ned died and they all went to the funeral. Still, it's something that I could believe he would do, if he were a real person, so my only negativity toward that would be the same as if a friend of mine had done that, not because it wasn't well-written.
Overall, the book started out GREAT. I was recommending it to people even half-way through. But when I felt the need to skip a chapter (and, surprise surprise - I didn't feel like I missed anything) and was saying to myself, "alright, just get through the rest of it and you can put it down forever," I stopped singing its praises.
I still, however, will check out the movie, because I found out about that first, and when I realized it was after a book, I felt it right to read it before watching. I think I might enjoy the movie even though I didn't enjoy the book.