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Loading... The Romanticby Barbara Gowdy
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. The title and the cover looked SO good...the book itself wasn't so good. It jumps around from different times and I just couldn't help thinking "get a grip girl!". I just wanted to shake the main character...didn't much like her and didn't care that she wasn't smart enough to change as she matured. ( )Very interesting book. So far so good... I found it to be about loneliness, inscrutability of choices we make, very existentialist. Intelligent and observant, non-sentimental, but sentimental, and not evenly good. Great humour in places. Who was the Romantic? no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0002005050, Hardcover)From the author of The White Bone, a piercing novel of passionate attachment and of the fear and freedom of letting go Louise Kirk learns about love and loss at an early age. When she is nine years old, her former beauty queen mother disappears, leaving a note that reads only—and incorrectly—“Louise knows how to work the washing machine.” Soon after, the Richters and their adopted son, Abel, move in across the street. Louise’s immediate devotion to the exotic, motherly Mrs. Richter is quickly transferred to her nature-loving, precociously intelligent son. From this childhood friendship evolves a love that will bind Louise and Abel forever. Though Abel moves away, Louise’s attachment becomes ever more fixed as she grows up. Separations are followed by reunions, but with every turn of their fractured relationship, Louise discovers that Abel cannot love her as fiercely and exclusively as she loves him. Only when she faces another great loss is Louise finally forced to confront the costs of abandoning herself to another. Skillfully interweaving the stories of Louise and Abel at different ages, Barbara Gowdy produces a powerful exploration of love’s many incarnations: a motherless daughter who yearns to be adopted, a husband eternally linked to a wife who has left him, a girl bewitched by the boy next door, a woman who refuses to let go of a magnetic, elusive man. Haunting and profound, The Romantic is a story about love in all its exquisite variations. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:54 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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