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Title: Same As It Never Was: A Novel by Claire Scovell LaZebnik ISBN: 0-312-31249-0 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.87 (15 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Clarity and Wit
Comment: The most significant thing about this book is its clarity and wit. The story is not unique but Scovell manages to find a unique voice to tell it. The voice of Olivia Martin is wonderfully sardonic, a sort of Jane Austen voice brought up to date with modern cynicism and bad language. A superbly drawn character is Joe Lowden, a handsome TA, who professes to love Olivia but has been congenitally unfaithful to his other girlfriends and has a "reputation". Scovell also echoes Anthony Trollope in that she allows her characters to have an imperfect but understandable personality, and then shows how the event and personality combine to form destiny. But in spite of the echoes of serious writers, this book is plain fun and can be enjoyed on its surface as much as on its inner voicings.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Terrible Twenties Meets The Terrible Twos
Comment: We find Olivia Martin at college, too smart to find happiness in the rote sequence of events there, and scarred by an unpleasant pair of parents. Olivia's voice is addictive, which propelled me through this book in an afternoon and evening.
The story and humor are character-driven, so they are much more satisfying than the cloying joke delivery systems usually rolled out as contemporary fiction. The characters are alternately imprisoned in situations and liberated from them by who they are, similar to the well-drawn, small-venue people of Richard Russo's stories. The same taut, yankee sensibility found in Russo (and Ford's) work is brought to bear on Los Angeles, with a cynical squint into the Pacific sunset.
Olivia does not soften, but she learns and her world gets larger. As a commentary and summary of the movement of twenty-somethings into the world of true adults (power! responsibility!), Same as it Never Was rang true for me. Olivia's life is full of real people, believable even to the point of being unlikable in some instances. Her examination of parenthood, and the usefulness of her acerbic wit, felt real to me, and paralleled some of my own discovers around the same age.
Funny, real, and memorable. I can't ask for more from a book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Family
Comment: What a lovely book! It is refreshing to watch a character (Olivia) grow up in the most important way, as a person. Olivia is presented as a mouthy brat in the opening sections, but by the end of the story, she has learned about herself in ways that validate her persona while she matures as a functional human being. This would be an excellent read for young women, perhaps to explore in a mother/daughter book club, but it is more than a young person's story.
As an aside, I purchased this book because of reading the reviews, but if I had just seen the book on the shelf, the hardback dust jacket would have put me off, and I would not have picked it up. It looks like a book about abused, misguided children and adolescent girls, with sex and drug problems. It is not. It really does a disservice to a fine book.
I look forward to reading whatever else authoress LaZebnik brings to us. Brava.
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Title: Candy and Me (A Love Story) by Hilary Liftin ISBN: 0743245733 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 03 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Family History by Dani Shapiro ISBN: 0375415475 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty ISBN: 1401300316 Publisher: Hyperion Press Pub. Date: 02 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler ISBN: 0763619582 Publisher: Candlewick Press Pub. Date: August, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.99 |
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Title: Family Trust by Amanda Brown ISBN: 0525947302 Publisher: E P Dutton Pub. Date: 10 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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