Wilson's Weblog

by Jeanine Cummins, 2020, Audiobook narraated by Yareli Arizmendi, Macmillan Audio

This book is a tough one to review because it’s not a bad book, but it’s not really a good book either.  The book was a selection for Oprah’s book club and received a great deal of publicity and acclaim.  Then it came under attack with scathing criticism because it was written by a white American author rather than someone who was supposedly Latina.  I personally don’t feel that a book should be judged based on the ethnicity of its author but rather on the work itself.

My disappointment with the book is because I felt the story wasn’t about the what I was expecting.  I was expecting a novel about some individuals migrating to the U.S. and requesting asylum.  The story turns out to be about a mother and child attempting to escape the grip of the crime cartels in Mexico after they killed her journalist husband and the other members of her family.  Lydia, the mother, had access to a considerable amount of money which helped her pay for her illegal passage into the U.S.  She and her son made it across with some difficulty, but did not experience any of the trauma associated with the refugee and asylum process (camps, separation from children, etc).

The story itself was okay but didn’t seem to grab me much.  The ending was abrupt and didn’t give a lot of satisfaction as to how it resolved.

So, while I reject the criticism that the book would only have been authentic if it had been written by a Latina author, I didn’t think reading (listening to) this book offered me much to get excited about.

by Ann Patchett, 2016, Audiobook narrated by Hope Davis, HarperAudio

I was totally disappointed in this book!  Fortunately, we got this audiobook from the library so I didn’t pay anything for it other than wasted time.

The book is about two families where the spouses get divorced and marry each other.  It focuses on the children of the marriages and the effects of the disruption that this situation causes… or so I think.  After finishing the book, I now am unclear as to what it was about.

The one redeeming feature of this audiobook was the narrator, Hope Davis.  She did a really outstanding job capturing the voices of each of the characters.  One of the problems of the book, however, is that there are too many characters to keep track of and I gave up trying to figure out which one was which and which one I was supposed to focus on.

I actually didn’t mind listening to the book, at least until the end.  And what an ending!  It just ended; not in the middle of a sentence or paragraph, but almost.  I think the author finally realized that the book was totally pointless and she didn’t have any idea where it was going.  Better to just end it and that’s exactly what she did.  What a piece of work that was!

I just can’t imagine that an author of the apparent renown that Patchett enjoys would stoop to publishing such a novel.  I think it shows the current state of popular fiction that an author can get away with it.

by Helen Simonson, 2016,  Kindle version, Random House LLC

This is the story of a family in England before WWI and how it affects their lives.

I decided to read this because it was shared to me by my wife on her Kindle.  I wanted to like this book, but it was just too slow.  I did like the characters, even though many of them were stereotypes.  The story was okay but lacked any depth.  Just another book cranked out by an author hoping to sell some books but nothing noteworthy.

Note: I just discovered as I perused the list of books I have read that I had already read this book back in January of 2017.  I guess it’s a testament to how little of an impression the book made on me in that when I listened to it, I didn’t even remember that I had already read it!