Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking

Aoibheann Sweeney’s debut novel, Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking, is the best coming-of-age novel I’ve read since Melanie Rae Thon’s Iona Moon.

Miranda Donnal lives with her father, a reclusive classicist translating Ovid’s Metamorphosis, on Crab Island off the coast of Maine. Miranda’s mother died when she was three, and Miranda has been raised mostly by her father and Mr. Blackwell, a Native American Indian who cooks, cleans, and nurtures the family when he is not fishing for a living. The relationship between the three is loosely-defined and delicately complicated as Miranda grows up.

The novel, like the passage from Crab Island’s channel to the dock at Yvesport, is driven by the undercurrents of what is felt show more but not said. When Miranda is sent to New York City to work at the classical institute her father co-founded, Miranda moves through poignant observations (families like to humiliate each other) to attraction (that full, pull excitement—that secret feeling, throbbing inside of us while the rest of the world stayed quietly oblivious) to intimacy (nothing had seemed interesting until there was someone listening).

Full of the rich symbolism of Greek mythology and peppered with keen statements about love and identity, Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking explores the tension between societal expectations and individual need, the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we share with others, and the courage needed to take an alternate route. show less

This novel is probably the most intriguing of those I’ve read about father-daughter relationships. Miranda and her stand-offish father live on a tiny island in Maine. Her mother died when Miranda was very young. The dad seems cruel at first, but this story is really about how Miranda grows to understand and appreciate him. Life for both is quiet on the island, but things change for Miranda when her dad finds her a job in New York City, a place he himself once lived.

The author refers to parts of Ovid’s Metamorphosis because the father’s job, within the story, was to translate this work. At first, I felt a little lost, not being big on mythology nor having read Ovid’s work. However, the mythology itself was treated lightly and show more wove its way into Miranda’s thoughts quite beautifully so I wasn’t put off by it after all.

There were two things that bothered me about this book, though. One was that two relationships in which Miranda engaged seemed somewhat thrust upon the story rather than emerging naturally. The other situation that bewildered me was that one character was just left dangling at the end!

Nevertheless, the overall mood of the story, that of melancholy and loneliness, seemed to just carry me along. I like that Miranda felt comfortable enough with her loneliness that it helped her to make personal choices in her favor. I think that’s a nice message. show less

Aiobheann (say "Even") Sweeney adds a worthwhile volume to the "coming of age" genre. Miranda, a teenager who grew up on a tiny island in coastal Maine, visits New York at the behest of her father, a classical scholar writing a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Books that make liberal use of metaphor, as this one does (episodes from Metamorphoses are sprinkled throughout), can be heavy-handed, but Sweeney has a light touch. While there's nothing startlingly original here, Sweeney's writing is pretty without being florid or baroque, and the narrative is engaging. (The end made me cry, quite unexpectedly, and I so love when that happens.)

It’s hard to resist a book with a title like this, and for most of the book I wasn’t let down. It wasn’t until the rather clichéd ending that I was a bit disappointed. The story is really told in two parts, the first is about Miranda’s early years on a tiny island off the coast of Maine where she lives with her reclusive and eccentric Ovid-translating father and a vague memory of a mother who disappeared long ago. The father is the epitome of the focused academic and if it weren’t for the amiable local fisherman, Mr. Blackwell, and Miranda’s wise-beyond-her-years cooking ability they’d probably starve. As the story develops Miranda makes her bumpy and uncomfortable way through puberty and finally moves into her father’s show more old Manhattan brownstone working for the Institute of Classic Studies where he apparently lead a vastly different lifestyle than the one Miranda now associates him with. It becomes apparent that her father, and his subsequent married life, might not be as predictable as most, and as Miranda tries to understand her own leanings she also comes to better understands her mother’s desperate choice and her father’s reclusive existence. I did think Miranda’s sexual choice in the end was a bit clichéd, but overall the story was pretty good. show less

A charming debut novel, about Miranda Donnal as she comes to know both herself and her eccentric father Peter. Deeper than its slim size would suggest, the book contains allusions to both Shakespeare's Tempest and tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses, which Peter has spent all of Miranda's life translating. Being a mythology geek, I really enjoyed some of the paralles Miranda drew between the tales she learned from her father and the people & events in her life. Overall, this is a genuine coming-of-age story that feels both modern and timeless.

It is not unusual for first novels to be of the "coming of age" variety. But seldom has anyone come of age the way that Miranda Donnal, the main character in Aoibheann Sweeney's first novel, manages to do it. Miranda, an only child, was taken to live on an isolated island about a mile off the coast of Maine when she was only two years old, and because her mother died not long after the family's arrival, she spent her formative years on the island with only her father and Mr. Blackwell, the family caretaker, as company.

Miranda's father isolated himself with his books and his lifetime project of producing a new translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses and was not much of a father to Miranda, preferring to leave her to her own devices as long show more as she was always home for dinner and available to type up his latest pages of translation. Luckily for Miranda, Mr. Blackwell did have some paternal instincts and he came to love the child in a protective way that her father could never equal. It was Mr. Blackwell who made sure that Miranda was enrolled in school and who was there to take her by boat to the mainland every morning until she was old enough to handle the trip alone. And it was Mr. Blackwell who educated Miranda in the ways of life on the island during all the years when her father seldom seemed to think about her.

Despite this unusual upbringing, Miranda felt protective of her father and seemed to understand why he was incapable of expressing or showing his love for her. So when he surprised her after her high school graduation by arranging a job for her in New York City with his friends at the cultural institute he helped to found there before leaving for his new life in Maine, she exchanged her tiny island for a much larger one. And she found more there than she expected to find.

She found her father.

Clue by clue, she pieced together the life her father lived in New York and came to realize that he was nothing like the man she had imagined him to be all of her life. And, at the same time, she learned as much about herself. She found friends and she found lovers in New York City. Her problem was to decide which were which, and when she finally did that she was ready to begin the rest of her life.

Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking, is a frank presentation of how life sometimes surprises us just when we think we have it all figured out. Sweeney places the reader in this unusual world in a way that makes it understandable and to seem almost normal, a remarkable achievement.

Rated at: 3.5 show less

I started reading this book as the train was taking me to a long awaited holiday. I hoped it would be an easy read but it took me by surprise.
The novel is full of hidden meanings and it is a story that seems followed by a cloud of sadness. The atmosphere is gloomy and it isn't at all the funny novel that you would expect when you read the title.
The daughter of a classical literature passionate, Miranda leaves on a journey of initiation to the city of all possibilities - New York - a city full of her father's hidden youth secrets but also of unexpected perspectives for the young girl who had spent had childhood almost inside of Ovid's Metamorhosis on a savage island in Maine. Miranda goes through the transformations of adolescence in a show more city that offers her more than she would have wanted. the greatest discovery, however, will be the love she has for her father and the permanent need to go back to her origins. show less