I read this book awhile back, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure I was going to review it.
But author Judy Blundell won the National Book Award for What I Saw and How I Lied, and so, you know … a review it is.
We begin our journey in Queens, New York in 1947. Evie, a teenager who seems to have too many angles and not enough curves, is hoping that life will return to normal now that her stepfather is back from the war. Instead, he acts moody, receives strange phone calls, and then takes the family on a spur-of-the-moment vacation to Palm Beach, Florida. The bulk of the story unfolds as Evie and her parents meet various people at the hotel, including the handsome Peter Coleridge, who served in the army with Evie’s stepdad.
The book deals with a lot of important issues: anti-Semitism, sex, coming of age … and, of course, lies. There are all sorts of twists and turns in this story, and it’s sure to make readers feel a lot of things: lust, jealousy, fear, anger … if you haven’t yet read the novel, I assure you your feelings will run the gamut.
… But. Oh, you knew there’d be a but, didn’t you? And with me, there is almost never a but. I suppose I feel like I missed something hugely important and incredibly brilliant. It’s like I’m in high school all over again, reading Nathaniel Hawthorne or F. Scott Fitzgerald and asking the teacher if we know the author meant to put all that symbolism in there, or if we just see it as a result of a million years of over-analyzing. (I can say now that I’m fairly certain my teachers were not trying to pull one over on me, but back then I felt certain that they were.)
So I must have missed something vital, and that’s how I’ve been feeling about this novel since I first read it. It’s enjoyable, yes. Although the ’40s lingo grates on my nerves a bit (”It’s not all polka dots and moonbeams” — a choice example, along with lots of ’40s-esque words like “jeepers” and “keen.”)
Still, I can’t say it’s not a good book.
And obviously it’s quite good, or it wouldn’t have beaten out my personal top two picks, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart and Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson, for this year’s National Book Award.
It is time, I think, that I sit down and re-read this thing (again), and I’m just going to keep going until I’m madly in love with What I Saw and How I Lied. Right now, I’m definitely in like, but not in love.
But you know, I always want to hear your opinions. So let’s start with this: Have you read the book? Did you love it? If you did, what did you love about it? And if you’ve read any of this year’s other finalists in addition to Judy Blundell’s work, tell me who your top pick was. (If you want to go even deeper, tell me what book should have been a finalist and wasn’t.) Also, zombies or unicorns?
I want to read this book. It does look very good. Thanks for the review!
I haven’t read it yet (I do want to), but I don’t see any reason you have to force yourself to fall in love with it. There hasn’t been a book invented yet that was a favorite and much-loved book for everyone, and your not much liking it is as valid as anyone else’s liking it.
Ah, Janni. In that you’re correct. However, I do feel as if I need to give the book another chance — it may be “a grower,” in the first place. In the second, sometimes I will read five books in two days, and after the third the last two don’t get the fairest treatment. So I will indeed be reading this again, and probably editing this review later with further comments. It may turn out that I’m still in like but not in love, in which case … so it goes. But I may also end up raving about “How could I have missed???”
We’ll see in a few days. Right now I’m taking a break from new fiction and re-reading LM Montgomery again. With a giant 100-year anniversary celebration to come on the 30th …
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks should have won. By FAR!
I liked it a lot, but I didn’t love it either. But I imagine that the “issues” piece made it more “book award”-able. CHAINS had that going for it too, but I did WHAT I SAW this better than CHAINS.
I have THE SPECTACULAR NOW on my nightstand and just can’t get started.
I have heard wonderful things about FRANKIE LANDAU BANKS and am saving it for a special vacation treat.
THE UNDERNEATH has (I believe) anthropomorphic animals in it. There is not a chance I am going near it.
Ooh, I really, really liked it! I am a huge fan of that language you didn’t love, though, so I was quite taken with the writing in that sense.