Saturday, March 03, 2012

I loved Norumbega Park

My review of the elegant Norumbega Park by Anthony Giardina. It's always a struggle when you just have 450 words, in which you not only have to say what a book is about but provide some semblance of an intelligent opinion. I could barely go into the story, and how richly drawn I thought each of its five characters were, and I couldn't quote from it for very long either. But I was really impressed and thought just maybe I had in my hands a kind of small, smart, impressive classic of family life in the late 20th to early 21st Century, that captures some sense of how time passes and how decisions, pattern of living, and so forth, establish themselves and direct the course. Giardina was particularly expert at chronicling how these characters develop, and I said in the review, he never gets sentimental, never gets corny; there's the occasional flourish here or there that I could have done without, but I was consistently impressed with the fact that he was always pushing himself to go a little deeper into these lives.

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