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Title: Blessings : A Novel by Anna Quindlen ISBN: 0-8129-6981-2 Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Pub. Date: 19 August, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.47 (88 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Nice easy read
Comment: What a joy it was to pick up a book that was easy to read, well-written, and had a satifsying ending. I'd give this six stars if that was available but suppose I'll have to make do with five.
Rich in imagery and well-developed characters, BLESSINGS is by far the best thing I've read in ages. Quindlen's sense of timing, her great dialogue, and the way the story unfolds is remarkable. Why don't more authors have her sense of style?
Also recommended: Black and Blue, Bark of the Dogwood by McCrae, and Pompeii
Rating: 4
Summary: Don't Skip This One
Comment: Blessings is the first novel I have read by Anna Quindlen and I will definitely read her previous works. Her characters were well developed - they were a cause for tears, smiles, anger, joy empathy and sympathy. In the telling of the story/stories at Blessings, Ms. Quindlen interweaves flashbacks very deftly to give us the history of the inhabitants from great-grandparents to the grandchild, Meredith. The outsider, Skip, displays the amazing love a man can show for a baby. He captured my heart which broke as well. The last chapters fittingly close Blessings in more ways than the obvious.
Rating: 4
Summary: "Blessings" graciously explores life's capacity for renewal
Comment: Novelist Anna Quindlen understands that an author must not only understand the people who populate her writings, she must love them. Her novel, "Blessings," is ample proof that fully-realized characters bestow a sense of grace and dignity as they struggle with their given circumstances. Quindlen tackles the themes of discovered opportunities, parenting, hidden shame and life's unexpected possibilities for renewal with her usual dignity and skill. It is the depth of her characterizations which invest her novel with strength and dignity.
Reclusive Lydia Blessing hires a handyman/caretaker on a whim. She knows little of his past, but trusts her own instincts. She lives alone, scarcely comforted by an irascible housekeeper and disquieted by a terrible sense of spiritual isolation. Utterly unexpecting the sudden altering of her sequestered existence, Lydia will be forced to confront not only the possibilities of love but of the necessity of facing a carefully hidden past.
Skip Cuddy is reeling from his own blighted choices; alone and disappointed with life's prospects, he discovers an abandoned newborn on the steps leading to his live-in garage apartment. With nothing other than hope to guide him, he accepts and ultimately embraces surrogate fatherhood. Naming and raising the baby girl he considers to be "his" Faith emerge as the galvanizing integrative forces on his personality. Qualities he never knew he possessed emerge; this marginalized, unconfident, doubting man evolves into a quiet, responsible and responsive parent.
The beauty of "Blessings" is its refusal to follow a "feel-good" formula; the conclusion is unsettling and provocative. Both of its protagonists struggle with themselves as they face the daunting task of assuming responsibility of Faith. Lydia ruefully looks back on her life, assesses the genesis of her short-lived marriage and evaluates her own mothering skills. Each recollection has its cost, and Lydia's veneer of comfortable routine and self-imposed exile dissolves under the redemptive weight of acceptance and love. Skip painfully unearths the cost of false friendship and learns that giving oneself to a child results in self-transformation and redemption. In this sense, Lydia and Skip's individual and mutual epiphanies are the novel's greatest blessings.
Anna Quindlen delights in asking questions to which her novel can only suggest answers. Preferring to allow her readers to involve themselves in the moral dilemmas her characters face, the author invites us to embrace and identify with her protagonists. As Lydia and Skip receive Faith -- as their daughter and as their purpose in life -- we come to understand our own obligations, to ourselves and to the people we choose to love and sustain.
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Title: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd ISBN: 0142001740 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 28 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Three Junes by Julia Glass, Julia Glass ISBN: 0385721420 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 22 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: One True Thing by Anna Quindlen ISBN: 044022103X Publisher: Dell Pub. Date: 01 August, 1995 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Dive From Clausen's Pier : A Novel by Ann Packer ISBN: 0375727132 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 08 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Lovely Bones: A Novel by Alice Sebold ISBN: 0316666343 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: 03 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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