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Loading... Bring Me One Of Everythingby Leslie Hall Pinder
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Leslie Hall Pinder is a phenomenal writer. She weaves the stories of Alicia Purcell, Austin Hart, the native tribes, Alicia’s mother and Austin’s family members into a well-constructed novel. Her characters are gritty, not usually completely likeable and all very real. They are the epitome of dysfunctional. Alicia is successful in the publishing business and an acclaimed poet. She accepts the job writing the libretto for the opera in part because she was strangely affected by Hart’s suicide many years earlier. The job brings her back to her childhood home only to find her mother ailing. As Alicia spends time researching the libretto, she and her mother work through a lifetime of animosity and misunderstandings. The story of the native tribes’ decline before, and especially after, the taking of the totem poles is not the major focus of the story and yet is a very powerful component. Pinder doesn’t overanalyze history while doing an amazing job of portraying the struggles of an entire people. She doesn’t preach to the ruling class for their role in the tribe’s demise. She portrays the facts as she sees them and leaves us to find our own interpretation. Her characters find a sort of redemption – Alicia with her mother, Hart’s family through Alicia’s research, etc. – but their anguish is not tied up in a neat little bow. There is no “happily ever after” here, just a “perhaps we’re better off from here on out”. BRING ME ONE OF EVERYTHING is a journey worth every reader’s time. Submitted for an honest review. Rating: 4.5 Heat Rating: None (minor discussion of sexual topics) Reviewed By: Jeanne Stone-Hunter My Book Addiction and More no reviews | add a review
Bring Me One of Everything is a novel which weaves real-life facts and fiction into an eloquent tale of suspense and intrigue. The title of the book is based on what the management of the Smithsonian is said to have demanded when sending ethnographers to native villages to gather artifacts for its collection: "Bring me one of everything." The novel is several layered stories centered around a troubled writer, Alicia Purcell, who has been commissioned to create the libretto for an opera about an anthropologist named Austin Hart. He earned fame in the 1950s for cutting down and bringing back to museums the largest remaining stand of totem poles in the world. They belonged to the Haida tribes who inhabit the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia. Hart's subsequent suicide creates the mystery Alicia attempts to solve as she consults present-day tribe members, Hart's friends and family, and his personal journals. Added to the complications of her search are Alicia's imperious though ailing mother, a cast-off lover, a narcissistic composer, and her own demons of disaffection. But an overarching question dogs her and the reader: why she is so obsessed with Austin Hart and this quest? No library descriptions found. |
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In a way this almost reminded me of Possession. ( )