Alexander Soldatov Soldatov itibaren Peterborough County, ON, Canada itibaren Peterborough County, ON, Canada

Borrowed from church library. THis is the hardest one to read because Konshaubi was treated poorly. Excellent for getting into, niggling into the brain and soul of a materialistic Christian and righting one's priorities. Humbling.

** spoiler alert ** "Adolescence is like having only enough light to see the step directly in front of you, and no further." p152 "Julia was water in his hands. She'd slipped right through. Lovely and strange and unpredictable,, she'd been everything he wasn't. Nothing he was used to. He'd reacted badly when she'd called him and told him she was pregnant., When he thought back to that conversation, it was like watching a movie. It was the only way he could deal with it, to totally dissociate. That wasn't him. That was a ghost of himself, some horrible boy who'd forced a troubled girl to have an abortion because he hand't wanted to face the consequences of his actions." p153 "Didn't you ever get homesick?" "I'm homesick all the time," she said."I just don't know where home is. here's this promise of happiness out there. I know it. I even feel it sometimes. But it's like chasing the moon-just when I think I have it, it disappears into the horizon. I grieve and try to move on, but then the damn thing comes back the next night, giving me hope of catching it all over again." p194 "The news soon made its way around the room like smoke." p222 "Are you going to stay?" Sawyer finally asked. "I spent so much time telling myself that this wasn't home that I started to believe it," she said carefully. "Belonging has always been tough for me." "I can be your home," he said quietly. "Belong to me." p233 "He might be tall enough to see into tomorrow, but he hadn't looked there in a long time. He'd forgotten how bright it was." p254

I love horses so much. But not this much. I played a horse in a college production of _Equus_. Everybody's got to start (or end) somewhere.

If someone asked me to describe this book in one word, I’d use pretentious or perhaps tedious. I can’t imagine what all those reviewers were thinking when they gave such high praise to this book. There’s an inherent problem in writing a book where both the characters are supposedly extremely intelligent and/or learned. The writer must be even more so. I would argue that Ms. Barbery’s characters fall short of the mark she was setting. Further, they were frequently boring and annoying. I found the “big reveal” of Renée’s “secret” near the end not unexpected and certainly nothing that should have scarred her as it did. The ending itself was a literary trick that shouldn’t have been allowed by the publisher and absolutely never should have been praised by the critics and public alike. If I’d paid cash for this book instead of getting it from the library I’d feel cheated. I mourn the hours I spent on this book when I could have been reading something so much better.