Evening Class (1996)

easy to read fluff. she doesn't tend to write about characters that i find terribly interesting and i feel like she does this weird thing where she just gives us this random snippet about her character's lives and nothing really happens in her books, but it's unoffensive and quick reading. ( )

Love this book so much. Have read it at least a dozen times and every time I get something different from it. I love how all the separate characters come together. And I really love that I get to "catch up" with them again in later books. Quentins, Scarlet Feather, Tara Road, although the outcome of some characters is not necessarily how I wanted but that is life. I truly love Maeve's books and her wonderful characters become friends.

I've recently reread this book (for the third or fourth time) to help me curb my Summer Blues. This is to me the coziest of all of Binchy's novels. I never grow tired of it. ( )

This book didn't appeal to me at first, but the more I read the more I got into the characters and how they came to know and love each other in the class. ( )

My mother recently visited me and left Maeve Binchy's novel, Evening Class, for me to read, and I'm very glad she did as she's not an author I've read before. Evening Class is set in Dublin and is essentially a collection of inter-related stories about a group of people who come together to take a course in Italian. The glue that holds together all of these people is Signora, the teacher who had spent 26 years in Sicily before returning home to Ireland following the death of the love of her life, but each of the characters has a deeper and more complicated life than appears to be the case initially. For instance, Fran and Kathy are the eldest and youngest sisters of a large family - or are they? Lou seems completely out of place in the course, but he has a surprising reason for being there. Connie is the wealthy lady who is hiding a lifetime of artifice and scandal.... And so on, and so on. I very much enjoyed this collection of character studies; although Binchy's writing seems to be very gentle and sweet, there are shocking truths revealed by each character as the reader gets to know them better, and one ends up with a feeling of rich satisfaction at the complex nature of life and of humanity. Recommended, and I'm definitely planning to read more of this marvelous writer! ( )