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brogan7's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
4.0
The first half of this book is absolutely outstanding. Tender, insightful, tense with danger (they are always close to peril, physical or emotional), it sweeps you along as a reader and the lines! The lines are like poetry, you think oh my goodness I must be missing pieces, it's so rich with words it drips like nectar, so much, so much.
The moment the narrative breaks is very clear: it's the first time in the book that Juliet is pulled into the future. The author refers to her as "middle aged.". The narrative thread spools, pools, bends back on itself, is broken.
I don't know why Snyder did this: and once, it was forgivable. But multiple times? And the story unspools but no longer holds the reader where we were...."the Juliet stories"--but it was a novel--but then it splinters and is stories, after all, but why? She never told us what we needed to know to end the first part of the story. The careful balance, the tension between mother and daughter, between which character we most wanted to see, between how a daughter sees her mother when that daughter is a child, and then when she is herself a woman...and how that woman sees herself, what she wanted, when she got together with her husband, and how things end up working out...
There were these filigrees of tension, and then Snyder dropped them and went on to tell other stories, Juliet stories, yes, but I wanted something more, something grounded in that first rush of 150 pages...
It is a beautiful book though. Well worth the read. An experience of language and through language that I won't soon forget.
"She has tears in her eyes. By gazing into the drink and not at her mother, she has allowed herself to let go, to ease into the song's ending, its unwavering high note held softly but tenaciously. The note does not drop down or fall off the way your ear anticipates, but holds, diminishing by increments until you can hear it no longer, though you imagine you are hearing it still." (p.240)
The moment the narrative breaks is very clear: it's the first time in the book that Juliet is pulled into the future. The author refers to her as "middle aged.". The narrative thread spools, pools, bends back on itself, is broken.
I don't know why Snyder did this: and once, it was forgivable. But multiple times? And the story unspools but no longer holds the reader where we were...."the Juliet stories"--but it was a novel--but then it splinters and is stories, after all, but why? She never told us what we needed to know to end the first part of the story. The careful balance, the tension between mother and daughter, between which character we most wanted to see, between how a daughter sees her mother when that daughter is a child, and then when she is herself a woman...and how that woman sees herself, what she wanted, when she got together with her husband, and how things end up working out...
There were these filigrees of tension, and then Snyder dropped them and went on to tell other stories, Juliet stories, yes, but I wanted something more, something grounded in that first rush of 150 pages...
It is a beautiful book though. Well worth the read. An experience of language and through language that I won't soon forget.
"She has tears in her eyes. By gazing into the drink and not at her mother, she has allowed herself to let go, to ease into the song's ending, its unwavering high note held softly but tenaciously. The note does not drop down or fall off the way your ear anticipates, but holds, diminishing by increments until you can hear it no longer, though you imagine you are hearing it still." (p.240)
Content Warnings
Moderate: War and Infidelity
Minor: Suicide
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