DNF & Notes
1. I already read the Sound and the Fury. Am I gaining anything here?
2. I was motivated to read by the Tim O'Brien blurb, and that I think this was given to me by someone I recently lost (someone with whom, however, I only shared a sliver of overlap in reading preferences).
3. But of course O'Brien would love something that speaks to the trauma of war.
4. The language could be beautiful, so I kept following sentences, and then realized despite that I wasn't engaging with the content.
5. After 10% I went looking at reviews, and on that strength skipped ahead to a Termite chapter. Sorry, no. I'll say it again, I want neurodivergent representation in literature, but an autistic youth as a plot device or gimmick feels icky.
6. I determined to abandon and read a quick internet summary of the main plots. Sorry, again a hard no. ( )

I loved it, but am discovering through it some inkling of the way what I love in stories works. And that's a bit troubling. The most gorgeously arresting portions of this work, for me, are perhaps the ones that strip out a certain layer of experience-in-time most precisely. That is, they are highly fabricated . . . and this poses the question then of what is driving the fabricating urge. Why this layer and not another? Why is what is left out left out? Finally then, why do we make the stories we make? It appears that it is not reality--full of pushes and pulls and mysteries and lumps, seamless, impersonal, endless--that drives this fiction and maybe any other. It's just what we want. And some kind of claustrophobia attends this.

The separate points of view as a fictional technique are gorgeously done here, utterly different but all connected by some recognizable atmosphere, the scent of time. ( )

This is a difficult book to get into, and it challenges the reader to the very end, but it is really worth the effort. A fascinating story, told from different characters perspectives, and yet even though the stories may get repeated, there is much discrepancies as to what is going on! Reviewers get so many details wrong that you wonder if they really read the book, or just skimmed it. You cannot skim this book! It is all in the details! A beautiful book, this writer can use words like few others! ( )

Review coming. Not what I expected when I started reading (after reading the back of the book). A National Book Award Finalist a few years back.

Long on the tbr list, I read this never expecting the drama, the sadness, the overwhelming twists. It was a bit overwhelming for me. This is a story that packs a punch -- a nasty one. This is a tale of love, of loss, of birth and death, of the Korean war and it's brutality.

Termite, a baby born with disabilities to a father, (Leavitt) fighting in Korea, hoping and praying to return to his bride Lola who is carrying Termite when Leavitt leaves for the war. Lark is also a child of Lola, father unknown till the end of the book. Both are left with Lola's sister to raise in poverty in West Virginia.

Replete with never ending sadness, I found this book to be too heavy. I finished it, but don't like the haunting feeling and wonderment of the need to be overbearingly intense.

Two Stars ( )