Reviews
I tell you this to explain how we kind of know who we are, without knowing it... What is it that William knew about me and that I knew about him that caused us to get married? This was a slow read, not because it was bad but because I had to give myself time to think in between paragraphs. Oh William! is a book about old people but also not really- it's a book about what we know and don't know about ourselves, and the people we love, and the people we've fallen out of love with. But who we still love, maybe kind of. I can't really tell you why I liked it so much; nothing really happened. It felt real, though, and sad, and I saw myself in these characters, as I'm sure anyone who reads this book might. It made me think about what life will look when I don't have much of it left. Maybe this review should actually be 5 stars, is what I mean. (Edit, 3 months later: Okay, so this book has stayed with me for much longer than I ever imagined. 5 stars it is.)
Oh, how delightful! What a strange thing to say about a book that deals with generational trauma, but it really is wonderfully charming. I didn't know that this was part of a series, but it's easy to jump right in. A nice quick read too.
Here Strout writes in what might seem an overly familiar style, as if she’s writing a letter to her best friend, about her exasperating (Oh William!) ex-husband. Instead of annoying or trite, it’s refreshing and indirectly, brilliantly insightful about the narrator and her ex-husband, and comes off as a welcome development of her character (this is the third in a trilogy about Lucy Barton). Through her chatty discourse, she reveals much about love and unexpected human strengths and deficits and how one can become the other, and we are often—always?—the last to catch on.
I’m still processing this book. I can’t decide if it was brilliant or purposeless. I should give it a three for now, which could be changed to a five or two.
I received an email from the publisher of Oh William! with a blurb that said "because you loved Taylor Jenkins Reid..." - I didn't have to read any more after that. I absolutely loved TJR! I fell in love with Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones and enjoyed the ride of Malibu Rising. Couple that with reading how the author of Oh William, Elizabeth Strout, won a Pulitzer Prize for her writing, and I really wanted to give this one a try. Oh William is book 3 of a series about Lucy Barton's life. It does read well as a stand alone. Book 1 was made into a Broadway show that starred Laura Linney. I had to see what this was all about! As a fan of women's fiction, there is a certain pace that I have become accustomed to. Stories can move quickly, and sometimes there are twists and turns you never saw coming. Characters come alive and I look for books that make me want to continue turning the pages. This story's pace was very different from that. The action in this story is very passive. I did not feel like I was there in the thick of it, but rather I was sitting in a rocking chair on a porch, listening to my grandmother tell stories of her life. Some places Lucy would say "I won't talk about that" and then later she would reminding us that she didn't want to talk about it but in order to make sense of the current story, we had to have a bit of extra information. Having come off of a story that was fast moving and a little bit of a spicy romance, this was an interesting change of pace. Strout can weave together a nice story, but you have to be in the right frame of mind for it. I would not call this a quick read or an exciting read, but it was nice to step outside of my story comfort zone and read something new. Thank you to the publishers for providing an advanced copy for review via #netgalley
