A review by elenajohansen
The House by the River by Lena Manta
1.0
DNF @ page 82, after the end of the "The First Years" section.
I was bored out of my mind.
Eighty pages of older men falling in love with younger women (but it's okay because it's not really pedophilia if you wait a few years for them to turn eighteen,) and endless tired metaphors about rivers, and high-strung daughters getting married or running away. And it's all just set-up for the individual sections about the daughters, apparently! I felt like I was speed-running the mother's entire life, and WWII with its Nazi occupation was just a bump in the road.
I will admit there's a possibility the book gets better when it decides to focus on one daughter at a time instead of trying to tackle them all at once, but the writing style is so bland that I don't care enough to find out, and I don't like any of the characters, because (as much as they have personalities at all) they're all basically the same--shouting, moody, dramatic women of various ages, with the mother being the worst, lamenting constantly about how it's so horrible that all her daughters want to leave home and have their own lives and woe is me, I'll be all alone in my old age.
I simply don't have the patience for it. Moving on.
I was bored out of my mind.
Eighty pages of older men falling in love with younger women (but it's okay because it's not really pedophilia if you wait a few years for them to turn eighteen,) and endless tired metaphors about rivers, and high-strung daughters getting married or running away. And it's all just set-up for the individual sections about the daughters, apparently! I felt like I was speed-running the mother's entire life, and WWII with its Nazi occupation was just a bump in the road.
I will admit there's a possibility the book gets better when it decides to focus on one daughter at a time instead of trying to tackle them all at once, but the writing style is so bland that I don't care enough to find out, and I don't like any of the characters, because (as much as they have personalities at all) they're all basically the same--shouting, moody, dramatic women of various ages, with the mother being the worst, lamenting constantly about how it's so horrible that all her daughters want to leave home and have their own lives and woe is me, I'll be all alone in my old age.
I simply don't have the patience for it. Moving on.