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Carregando... No One Is Coming to Save Us (2017)de Stephanie Powell Watts
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Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. This one really just didn't land for me. Right off the bat, the prose was really halting, and I had such a hard time easing into the book. This may've been by design and the fault mine, but nevertheless, it was just a really unpleasant read for me. I've read snippets suggesting that the book is kin to The Great Gatsby, which I suppose I can see. For what it's worth, I didn't like that book either. Set in modern day North Carolina, Powell Watts tells the story of Ava and Sylvia, mother and daughter navigating family, change and the future. Ava’s lackluster marriage to underachiever Henry is falling apart as she makes what may be a final, desperate attempt to have a child. Then her first love moves back to town in a flashy mansion on a hill. Sylvia’s troubles are with the past and present, too, and with her troubled daughter. This is a moving, engrossing and character-driven story about family- the one you’re given and the one you choose, even when life doesn’t go as expected. It’s a lovely and honest look at being a woman, a wife and a mother and making peace with what is and what can be. This novel centers on an African-American family in a small town in North Carolina, and primarily on the aging Sylvia and her daughter Ava, who is dealing with infertility, a philandering husband, and the return to town of her childhood best friend/old flame after a long absence. My feelings about this one are so mixed that it's actually kind of hard to articulate them. There is certainly quite a bit here to like. Sylvia is a good character, complex and interesting. Ava was less so to me, but there were times when Watts made me feel for her pretty effectively. And there are some genuinely insightful moments, about all kinds of things: family relationships and those between men and women, aging, regrets, class and race and sex, the human experience in general and that of black women in particular. And yet, there was just something about the writing here that I struggled with, and I can't even entirely put my finger on what it is. Or rather, I can identify some of it: The way it sometimes randomly changes POV for a few sentences or a few pages (a style some people can pull off, but which usually just really irritates me, and mostly did here). The way it also sometimes slips into flashback without warning in a way that can be briefly confusing. The way the characters sometimes slip out of realistic-sounding dialog and start speaking more in Meaningful Abstractions. Actually, now that I look at that list, maybe that's explanation enough. I don't know. What I do know is that for a while in the middle, I was absorbed enough in these people's lives to be reasonably happy with it, anyway, but by the end I was feeling impatient and a little unsatisfied. sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
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Fiction.
Literature.
HTML: JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he's startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can't seem to carry one to term. Her husband, Henry, has grown distant, frustrated by the demise of the furniture industry, which has outsourced to China and stripped the area of jobs. Ava's mother, Sylvia, caters to and meddles with the lives of those around her, trying to fill the void left by her absent son. And Don, Sylvia's unworthy but charming husband, just won't stop hanging around. JJ's returnâ??and his plans to build a huge mansion overlooking Pinewood and woo Avaâ??not only unsettles their family, but stirs up the entire town. The ostentatious wealth that JJ has attained forces everyone to consider the cards they've been dealt, what more they want and deserve, and how they might go about getting it. Can they reorient their lives to align with their wishes rather than their current realities? Or are they all already resigned to the rhythms of the particular lives they lead? No One Is Coming to Save Us is a revelatory debut from an insightful voice: with echoes of The Great Gatsby it is an arresting and powerful novel about an extended African American family and their colliding visions of the American Dream. In evocative prose, Stephanie Powell Watts has crafted a full and stunning portrait that combines a universally resonant story with an intimate glimpse into the hearts of one family Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — Carregando... GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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Whereas the earlier novel addresses the American dream of a small, insular world, Watts expands the dream to those who come from less privileged circumstances who still dare to want to improve their lot. The realism saves the characters from being brittle when their bright shining light in the distance turns out to be tarnished or unobtainable.
Watts weaves characters who don't have the luxury of letting handlers clean up their messes. And yet the strength displayed in living with the consequences of their messes make each sympathetic. Perhaps what made the book most successful is the author's ability to look into the past at the same time the action is moving forward. Watts does not lay out the tragedies that haunt Sylvia, Ava, JJ, or Henry at the beginning - only showing that they are affected by those tragedies. When the events are finally revealed the result is a deepening of sympathy and hard-earned wisdom for the characters.
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