Disobedience

by Jane Hamilton

Seventeen year old Henry Shaw learns of his mother's passionate affair when he stumbles across her email correspondence with her lover. His image of her is shattered. His younger sister Elvira is stuck in 1862 with her Civil War infantry regiment. Displaced from Vermont to Chicago, each member of the family finds their dreams hard

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Book Club, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, Coming Of Age

272 pages, Paperback

First published October 17, 2000

About the author

Jane Hamilton is an American novelist.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book grated against my skin, but I wouldn't say it was a bad book, and the secondary character- a die hard 11 year old civil war re-enactor who also happened to be a girl- was fascinating and I loved her. I kept wanting to stuff a sock in the narrator (her brother)'s mouth, to hear more about her. It was like being invited to someone else's family reunion, and finding yourself really interested in everyone in the family except for the one pouty, self involved teenager you are seated next to, and who monopolizes conversation for the next three hours, while picking at his acne. And sighing. A lot.

Also- this is one of those rare, rare books for me in that my inability to be a teenage boy who is secretly monitoring his mother's on-line affair with a man not his father really limited my ability to be interested or sympathetic to the character or his struggles. I kept just feeling sort of grossed out that he was so into the details of his mom's affair.

Yet again, Jane Hamilton managed to make me feel like she was treating the reader with contempt, and yet again, I read the whole thing, and the writing was very good, and the ideas were interesting. Jane Hamilton, I shake my fist ot your queasily sadistic writing!

[Danita M · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have enjoyed some Jane Hamilton books more than others. This one was very good. Her prose is beautiful, and her subject matter interesting. I liked the quirkiness of the characters (Civil War reenactments, musicians that play music most people have never heard). Their interests (sometimes obsessions) with the past sometimes made me forget that the setting was modern day… until it started talking about e-mail again.
I particularly liked that she chose to tell the story that is largely about a woman’s adultery from the point of view of her son. This perspective was fascinating, especially because he can not identify with her as an adult or as a woman, which makes her actions so mysterious to him.
I would definitely recommend this novel.

[Katie · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is terrible. At first I thought it was because it's been a while since I read something literary, I tend to like more populist novels. But the more I read the more I felt like I was slogging through mud. The first 100 pages are so repetitive, so circular. Nothing happens. Less than nothing happens. If you've read the first 10 pages, then effectively you've read the next 90, maybe even the next 150.

Henry Shaw's mother is having an affair - an affair he meticulously documents and which allows him to hold the moral high ground for the entire book. The odd thing about his meticulous documentation is that it's so repetitive and shallow. We learn the same few details over and over. While he has her personal thoughts on the matter from hacking her email, her emotions, her reasoning is so strangely absent from the entire thing that the book essentially becomes about Henry - an 18 year old, self involved teenager, and that is about as boring as it sounds.

I cannot stress how little happens in this book and how much the details are superficially turned over and over. I will give an example:

Henry learns of the affair and wonders about telling the two female friends in his life: Lily, his Madonna, and Karen, his chaste bodhisattva. He imagines several versions of telling Lily, he imagines her reactions, he imagines how it will bring them closer. He imagines her visiting. Then she visits and he tells her and it is exactly like he imagines. This is not even a chance we are given to see him as an unreliable narrator.

Then he imagines telling Karen, he imagines what she will say, and then we are told (no seeing! There is not enough dialogue in this book to fill a single chapter of other books) that she reacts in the exact way he imagined she would and it makes him furious! Because she put it in perspective and gave him context and he wants it to just be his! (Rather than belonging to his mother and father who it should)

The weird thing is that I kept slogging through, hoping something, anything would happen, that there would be any action or dialogue and just when I was on the point of giving up - about 210 pages in, action did start happening. And it was terrible.

Up until that point, Henry's moral superiority and version of his mother's affair had seemed fairly "teenager" and not really that malicious. It seemed self involved and a way of putting this complex story into a superficial format. But when his sister is outed as a girl at her civil war reenactment camp, he literally misses the assault, the actual things that are happening, and sees instead a bunch of innocent men tearing (literally shredding, he's left holding shreds) the clothes off a 13 year old girl as an innocent prank. And when his mother violently threatens them in order to get them to stop assaulting his sister and to put her down, Henry sees it as a terrible over-reaction, as his mother behaving like a fool.

It's frankly distressing, because even when confronted with the reality, it's like he can't stop seeing his mother as the harlot, as a stupid woman, that when we as readers find out that his father knew for a while and that the relationship between his mother and father is more complicated than Henry can understand, Henry refuses to accept that.

For a book that purports to be such a detailed account of an affair it is both a superficial account of an affair and a superficial child narrating.

[Holli · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book. I listened to the audio version, narrated by Robert Sean Leonard, who did a great job. Like Hamilton's other book, When Madeline Was Young, this one is also sort of a coming-of-age story narrated by a teen-aged boy, but this one is much more effective.

I found this book to be very humorous. It's a certain kind of humor, a hint of sarcasm, but not meanspirited. Maybe "droll" is the right word. I heard Jane Hamilton speak earlier this year and I was surprised at how funny she is. She was a hoot. Most of her books are so serious, but this one reflects her brand of humor--sort of Garrison Keillor meets Anne Lamott. That being said, the story is not comedic. Henry, the narrator, is having a rough year, what with his mom's affair and everything, but there's this subtle humor running through the novel that really kept my attention.

I enjoyed all the characters. Hamilton does a good job of making them very human. They are kind of quirky, but very real. I think I know some of them.

I especially liked the resolution of the book and what it says about marriage.

The good news is that when I got to the end of the tape, I realized that it was abridged. So now I get to read the book sometime and there will be more of it!

[Lisa (NY)]

Disobedience is about a year in the life of 17 year old Henry Shaw. He is dealing with the discovery of his mother's secret affair, his sister's obsession with Civil War re-enactments plus a crush on a girl in another city. Once I started listening to it I realized it was a 5 1/2 hour abridged audiobook. I liked the narrator and was curious what an abridged experience would be like, so decided to continue. Apparently there is no unabridged audio of this book.

Jane Hamilton is a fine writer and I found the novel quite engaging but have no idea how to rate it. It did seem truncated. Why would you abridge a 273 page novel? They must have cut it down by about 4 hours, but why? I have the printed version here but probably won't investigate further because I feel satiated enough with my edited experience of the novel.

[Sheba · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book just made so much sense. How Miss Jane Hamilton wrote a boy, and not just any boy but a lovely, funny, bare, boy, is inconceivable to me.

It's a love story between a son and his mother. It's a storing of weaning, a boy who becomes a man through vigilance over his mother's personal correspondence with her lover. Watching her fall in love, betray her husband and her family allows him to fall out of love with the woman who raised him and judge and differentiate from the woman she is. An awkward, gorgeous, confused woman. A very human woman. He grows to hate her, but with a sort of kindness, because afterall, it's a fine line and this is a weaning, not a matricide.

And I am making it sound tragic, and ponderous and incestuous; but that's not it.

I have had three boyfriends who loved their mothers more than they would ever love me. And when you are tabled from the start, it's never really a competition, sex is twisted and deep but their eyes are veiled. They value virginity but treat you like a whore. All their shirts smell of guilt. They are the worst kind of men. Except for the kind that don't love their mothers at all. Those, I run fast from.

So I loved loved this boy. Weaning is hard and he was so brave. He gently, carefully as he put it, "put her over his knee and cracked her in two; " but with the deepest and most profound love. I would have been curious to meet him as an adult and his sister too.

Devastating climax and all that but the best thing about this book was it made me laugh out loud and without warning.

[Sara the Librarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Books like "Disobedience" aren't normally my cup of tea. But this melancholy coming of age story goes well beyond the usual book club fare.

The story of sweet, sad Henry Shaw and his amazingly disfunctional but incredibly compelling family is so very much worth reading. Its one of my "go to" novels and I've thumbed through it many times.

From his border line, Civil War reenacting sister who wears rebel grey everywhere they go to a passionate, very imperfect mother everyone in Henry's world is worth coming to know.

This is a quiet book. One for an evening in spring when its starting to stay light out longer and you sit on your back porch and meander slowly through the end of a boys childhood into that wretched, wonderful world we all have to enter sometime.

[Isa | Mil Histórias · Rating 2 out of 5]

Já tenho livro há muitos anos, mas por alguma razão fui sempre adiando a sua leitura. O meu instinto tinha razão.

Não gostei da escrita da autora. Estrutura muito dispersa, com informações paralelas que não achei relevantes para a história principal.

A história é contada apenas através do ponto de vista do filho da "mulher desobediente" e nunca nos apresenta diferentes perspectivas de outras personagens ou até mesma da mulher que dá nome ao livro. Nunca sabemos o que realmente pensa, a razão das suas acções. Apenas podemos supor através daquilo que o filho nos relata. Talvez fosse essa a sua intenção, mas não funcionou comigo.

Achei que o suposto caso extra-matrimonial da mãe (acho que não é spoiler, pois está implícito na sinopse) não foi bem conduzido e muito pouco informativo.

A história está muito centrada no filho adolescente. Reconheço a tentativa da autora em abordar as questões típicas da adolescência: a rebeldia, a confusão de emoções e sentimentos, a revolta perante tudo e todos. Na minha opinião considero que se focou demasiado nisso e afastou-se da história inicial.

Não senti qualquer ligação com as personagens nem com a escrita da autora. Reflecte de alguma forma a comunidade em que as personagens estão inseridas, mas ainda assim gostaria de ter tido uma visão mais ampla da história. A premissa era muito interessante, mas conduzida de uma forma que não me agradou.

[Barksdale Penick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Note: there are spoilers in this review but to my mind not the sort of spoiler that would in any way diminish the reading experience for you.


Disobedience ends with our narrator, a senior in high school named Henry Shaw, saying part of him wished this book could have been written about his father but that he had to write it about his mother. The centerpoint of the story is indeed the affair that his mother Beth has with a fellow musician, but all 4 members of the Shaw family are very much involved in the story. Henry learns of his mother’s affair because the family has acquired a computer and Beth uses it to write to her lover, using the screenname Liza38. Since Henry is the only tech resource in the family, he reads all of the lovers’ correspondence. Henry keeps his mother’s secret but pushes away from his mother who for a while assumes it is simply teen angst and the need to separate that causes his behavior. One bit of writing that I loved is the way Henry refers to his mother using “Beth”, “Liza38”, and “Mrs. Shaw”, depending on whether he is referring to he in her role as a mother, wife, or paramour—it may sound contrived but worked very well and seemed plausible as the way Henry’s thoughts would run. His father is always Kevin, a devoted school teacher who shares an interest in Civil War re-enactment with Elvira, the 11 year sister of Henry. Elvira is a noncomformist who decides to pretend to be a boy and successfully joins a hard core regiment of re-enactors.
As the action develops, the book is laugh out loud funny—it reminded me of Richard Russo. As the affair continues and becomes more complicated and less lighthearted, the humor waned in a way that paralleled his mother’s state of mind. The action eventually takes us to a re-enactment of the Battle of Shiloh, which the entire Shaw family attends to see Elvira in her new hardcore role—all clothing hand stitched and no modern food or comforts—where the story takes an unexpected twist that in turn leads to a rapprochement between all of the Shaws, although of course the egg can’t be put back together perfectly. And the humor comes back into the story line. One aspect I didn’t love was the role of a fortune teller, whom Henry visits after reading in his mother’s emails that she had done so. It isn’t a central story line but seem contrived to get a few laughs.
Although Henry said the book is about his mother, he really is the main character—a smart boy learning about adults and coping in teenage fashion. He is almost a little too wise, especially when he ruminates about his mother’s motivations for her wanderings, but a definitely teenage boy. There are little bits of Henry’s future life in the book, when he looks back and remembers reflecting on the events of the book when he is older. Disobedience has a wonderful cast of characters, each member of the Shaw family is believable and well drawn, and the other characters stand up as well. I guess I’ll have to go read some more Jane Hamilton.

This was a close call between a 4 and 5 rating but I really enjoyed so I went with a top rating.

[Trux · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall I just "liked" the book, but feel like I should give it a grudging four stars, because there were indeed some aspects of it that I *really* liked. I loved Elvirnon, for example, and her passion for authentic Civil War re-enactments. I wouldn't want to read a whole book about that, but it was perfect as a metaphorical backdrop here. Didn't love the main character, but I guess we're not supposed to a whole lot. Maybe? I don't know, but it's hard to love a book when the only person you love in it is the little sister of the protagonist you don't like very much at all. Still, I get the feeling the book is masterfully written. I wonder how I'd have felt about it if I'd read it when I was Henry's age - it might have been really intense to me then, back when I was (more capable of?) experiencing similar disillusionment.

I was touched by the ending and appreciated the whole confused romance, fascination and, unfortunately, hatred/resentment/disgust felt by a son towards the mystery and BIGNESS in his life that is his mom, and a little depressed by the empty little asshole that he seems to be both as a teenager and apparently as a still-stunted adult narrator looking back years later. Henry tries to be flip and funny . . . he is a little, but mostly he's a little shit. What was I supposed to be rooting for? I couldn't root for him at all or imagine any positive possibilities in his life story I'd want to read about . . . so I guess the mom is the real main character because maybe we can kind of root for her? Except you can't feel/wish strongly that she commit to one path or the other, so that also is a little boring and depressing. The only person you root for is Elvie. And maybe Lily and Karen, that they'd tell Henry to fuck off or punch him in the face or something. Oh gosh, I'm so mean!!

Maybe this book is pretty awesome because I find myself wanting to talk about it with other people who've read it to see how it made them feel. I don't know. But I hope to Christ I never get an impulse to re-read it. ANNOYING.

[Kirsten · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aaaaaaand we're back to 2 out of 5 stars.

I really need to make a shelf called "Mom Books", because that's really what this one was. I had a hard time figuring out what type of person Henry was; his narrative voice was really kind of...muddled, almost? Like, was he 30, 17, 22? WHO'S TO SAY. His vocabulary and prose didn't really seem to gel all the time, and really, not that much happens in this book. I have to assume that I marked it as To-Read because the whole infidelity thing seemed interesting, but #spoiler this book doesn't even really get into that part of the plot at all. I dunno, maybe I'm so unsatisfied because nothing was really resolved at all, most importantly Henry's own feelings regarding his mom's less-than-desirable behaviour.

The most interesting part of this book was how he referred to his mother using like, 8 different names. Liza38, Beth, Liza, Liz, Elizabeth, etc. etc. It could have been a really interesting commentary on detachment, maturation, familial bonds, and separation anxiety, but nope. Hamilton decided not to go there and instead make a book with the shortest bursts of interesting-ness but a good font, so my eyes weren't entirely unhappy while reading it the whole way through. #disobedience? #morelikedisappointment #mombooks

PS there was like, no dialogue in this book and I found that super hard to read, and Henry just kept prattling on and on about nothing, leaving me to think to myself "doesn't this ranga have any friends I mean SRSLY"

[Manik Sukoco · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rite of passage story about Henry, who at 17 has discovered his mother's infidelity by reading her email messages, Disobedience explores complex family and gender themes. Marital strife, the disillusionment of a young man with his mother, a pubescent girl's rejection of her female self, and the desire of all members of the family to live in some form of fantasy rather than reality form the spine of this story.
Jane Hamilton has made some bold decisions as an author in the writing of Disobedience. Henry's imagination about the affair is the primary source of information about his mother's feelings. Hamilton loops back and forth through time as she follows Henry's description of the events of his senior year from his vantage point as an adult almost ten years later. Hamilton has written a novel about infidelity in which the wife, the husband and the lover are all still likable, wherein no one person is painted with a black and white brush. The Shaw family that Henry observes is both distanced by time and brought forward by passion in such a way that the reader is never at rest, never lulled into an easy acceptance of the narrative line.
I highly recommend Disobedience for a thought or discussion-provoking read. Just don't expect it to be unchallenging.

[Susan Liston · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another book on my shelf for years (I must have liked the cover?) that closed libraries steered me towards. And it was....fine, I suppose. This is the sort of book that makes me fear there is a point here about Life that I am not getting. It starts off with an interesting premise, the teen aged boy narrator snoops in his mother's email and discovers she is having an affair. And that's kinda it, no plot really develops from there. He just muses and imagines things. There is another child, Elvira, a young teen girl who is Civil War crazed. Now she was entertaining, but this is the sort of character where, if this was a memoir and she was real, I would say, oh my, she's great, truth is stranger than fiction! But as she is fictional, I don't believe her. Overall the book is repetitious, and slow, and nothing much happens, but it may have a point! I am just the wrong person to ask.

[Stacy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is too. And everyone in it is too. Too wordy. Too unique. Too stereotyped. Too obsessive. Too extreme. I mean, he couldn't just be a political father - he is a socialist with a history addiction. The mom isn't just a musician - she practically exudes music in her breath. The son isn't just a teenage boy with typical angst and self-discovery issues - he is amiable, polite, socially acceptable to English dancing parents and voyeuristic. The daughter. I can't even make a too statement for her because she wears sabers everywhere and has violent, hate-filled moments that are related to mild dispersions against Civil War generals. I mean, she's not believable on any scale, nor is the family's reaction to her.

If this is Jane Hamilton (and based on other reviews, it is), then the author and I will happily part ways now.

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've read other Jane Hamilton books and enjoyed them, but this one was a slow go for me. An interesting idea for a book about the Shaw family with 17 year-old Henry as the narrator who reads his mother's e-mails and discovers that she's having an affair. There's Elvira, the quirky sister and Kevin, the pre-occupied dad, and Beth, the mom who comes across as a flat character. Kevin's thoughts are random making the book choppy and uninteresting. I didn't care about these characters and would have given up reading if this had not been a book club selection.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book that takes a look at infidelity from a teenage son's perspective. He finds out about his mother's secret and it eats him alive. This book has very memorable characters and interesting historical references.

[Sophie Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this authors commitment to making the story an average every day one. The boy discovers his mother is cheating early on and tells the story of the year of the affair. Its told seemingly in the present, but with reflections as though he writing about his past. As soon as you think things are hitting a head, everything sort of stops and its not nearly as dramatic as you'd think. Love this author and her beautiful writing. I love how she writes about wisconsin. I wish I could find more by her!

[Candice · Rating 4 out of 5]

I may have said this before but Hamilton really fits into my theory of Great Lake writers who often include a gritty, edgy, droll, realistic view on their subjects. She has a great imagination and I really felt like I was right in the middle of this family observing everything that was going on. I found the twists and turns unpredictable, much like life.

[Ami Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book- my 3rd time to read it.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henry Shaw is a high school senior who, at seventeen years old, is about as comfortable with his family as any teenager can be. His father, Kevin, teaches history with a decidedly socialist tinge at the Chicago private school Henry and his sister attend. His mother, Beth, who plays the piano in a group specializing in antique music, is a loving, attentive wife and parent. Henry even accepts the offbeat behavior of his thirteen-year-old sister, Elvira, who is obsessed with Civil War reenactments and insists on dressing in handmade Union uniforms at inopportune times.

When he stumbles on his mother's email account, however, Henry realizes that all is not as it seems. There, under the screen name Liza38, a name Henry innocently established for her, is undeniable evidence that his mother is having an affair with one Richard Polloco, a violin maker and unlikely paramour who nonetheless has a very appealing way with words and a romantic spirit that, in Henry's estimation, his father woefully lacks.

Against his better judgement, Henry charts the progress of his mother's infatuation with Richard - her feelings of euphoria, of guilt, and of profound, touching confusion. His knowledge of Beth's secret life colors his own tentative explorations of love and sex with the ephemeral Lily, and casts a new light on the arguments - usually focused on Elvira - in which his parents routinely indulge. Over the course of his final year in high school, Henry observes each member of the family, trying to anticipate when they will find out about the infidelity and what that knowledge will mean to each of them. Henry's observations, set down a decade after that fateful year, are so much more than the "old story" that his mother deemed her affair to be.

I thought that this book was just okay - to my mind, the story could have been told more simply, without such intense focus being paid to Elvira's obsession about the Civil War. Disobedience by Jane Hamilton wasn't perhaps my favorite book of all time, but I am certainly still interested in reading more books by Jane Hamilton. I give Disobedience by Jane Hamilton an A!

[Meghan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A teenage boy named Henry reads his mom's email and finds out she's having an affair, then creepily keeps secretly reading her email for months and months, printing out messages as an archive, and just generally creeping it up and obsessing about how her affair relates to him. His mom at one point goes to a tarot reader and emails a friend about how the reader told her that Henry and she were married in a past life, and now they're mother and son. Henry reads that email, of course, and thinks disturbing thoughts about his mom's affair. He refers to her variously as Beth, Liza, and Mrs. Shaw in his narration. Nothing really happens - Henry, the teenage boy, living in an upscale Chicago neighborhood, is described as smart and amiable, someone who does what's expected of him. His younger sister is the only character with any life: a butch girl obsessed with Civil War reenactments. This brings me to the heart of my irritation, which is that the mom is completely upset throughout the whole novel because her daughter wants to be a boy in Civil War reenactments. She is described as profoundly torn up inside that her daughter is not interested in feminine things or in wearing dresses, but the mom is such a poorly drawn character that it doesn't make sense that she would be upset, and then there's a climactic incident that ends with the daughter giving up on her obsession with the Civil War.

Horribly self-important and serious-minded, too literary, the description of a boy poisoning himself slowly by being unable to stop invading his mother's privacy doesn't ever come to life on the page - he's kind of a cipher who doesn't suffer consequences, and his mom is much the same.

[Jan Priddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

About halfway through my second reading, I was inclined to take off a star from my earlier rating of five. I caught myself wanting to skim some paragraphs, and recalling that I wanted to do that the first time. Perhaps this novel could have been 50 pages shorter. I loved the book when I read it the first time between 2001 and 2002, and now as I reread, I became curious about that affection. One issue other reviewers have is that the narrator Henry is annoying, but perhaps that's what I most enjoyed. I get him, I see his flaws, I see beyond his (mis)understanding. Few writers can carry off unreliable narrators as well as Jane Hamilton.

When I completed this second reading I was again overwhelmed with admiration for the author and what she accomplishes in this novel. Hamilton is five years younger than I am and thus was still in her early 40s when she wrote this. It deals with many issues, including a real fear that children/parents will leave us and not return, that as parents/children we will be judged, that our lives will taken an irrevocable detour away from happiness, and that we may misunderstand our own life story. Henry manages all this.

It's still a five.

[Frederick Bingham · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a story about Henry Shaw. He and his family have just moved from rural Vermont to Chicago, where is father is a teacher and his mother is pursuing a career as a musician. Mid-way through his senior year, Henry discovers his mother is having an affair with another musician. He learns this because he figures out how to read his mother's email. She and her lover correspond frequently.Most of the book is about how Henry deals with this knowledge. He keeps it mostly a secret. He does tell his little sister, a 13-year-old girl who is big on civil war re-enactments.Henry manages to deal with the knowledge of his mother's affair in a very calm way. In fact he is so calm about it that is a little bit difficult to believe. The climactic scene near the end of the book, the scene where his mother seems to realize the futility of the affair, is odd and difficult to visualize the way it is described. Other than that, this is a good story of adolescence and a teenager finding out his parents are deeply flawed.

[Sterlingcindysu · Rating 3 out of 5]

The amount of research that went into the characters' background was extensive! The sister and husband/father are in Civil War re-enactments (and with living in northern Virginia, there's alot of that going on here.) The mother is a pianist with old-timey folk dances.

So, okay the characters were well fleshed out (and I wish the mother in law Minty would had more of a hand in the story than just dispensing money), but the story, not so much. It's about the son, Henry reading his mother's email accounts and discovering she's having an affair. This was written in 2000 so that makes sense that he had helped her create an account and knew her password. The son is amazing calm for a high school senior and there's little mention of the college search, jobs, proms, etc. Since this account is written long after this year happened, ok, it's written through the eyes of a more mature man than a 17 yo boy. But even written by a 27 yo man, it didn't ring true.

I wish Elvira (the daughter) had been the story's focus and the affair a secondary plot.

[Carolyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ho hum. I didn't like this one as much the other Hamilton books I've read. The narrator is a man, telling us about his family 10 years ago, during his senior year of high school. I'm sure it had "meaning", but I found it distracting that he referred to his mother as Mrs Shaw, Beth, Liza(the name she used on the email account with which she communicated with her lover and her best friend), and 'my mother'. It irritated me. Also, he seemed a little TOO concerned with his mom and her affair. Not that a kid wouldn't be. Not that I wouldn't have read those emails too. But it was a tad on the creepy side, the thoughts he had about her. Also, the 13 year old sister's obsession with the Civil War seemed a bit over the edge. It has been a long time since I've been 13, and I don't know many kids these days, but she didn't seem very realistic to me. It was ok, but I kept wanting to be done reading it, and not in a good way. I just wanted it to be over.

[Jennifer G · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can never accuse a Hamilton book of being "light reading," (I almost jumped off a bridge after reading A Map of the World), but this book is probably as close as she can get while still maintaining that dramatic focus on trauma within a family. A teenage boy inadvertently reads his mother's email (that fact is still hard for me to swallow), and discovers she's begun an affair with an immigrant violin maker. The book traces the boy's life as he traces his mother's affair through her emails to the lover and her best friend. The book is quite good, on the verge of being extra special, but never quite getting there. Lots of questions about family and how we feel about them (particularly a son's love for his mother), are touched on. The characters in the book are interesting, to say the least, including a younger sister obsessed with Civil War reenactments. Recommended.

[Natalie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really liked the narrator's younger sister, who's an obsessive cross-dressing historical re-enactor. But too often she's on the scene only to mark the family's "quirkiness" or comic academic dysfunction -- which was uneasily deployed as contrast to the emotional tragedy supposedly experienced by the "I'm too smart for this narrative" narrator. The facade of Writerliness -- supposedly of the narrator, not the novel's author -- was far too irritating and got in the way of any sparks the novel could have had. I skimmed the last third of the book and yes, it spun out exactly as I could have predicted. And that's disappointing, since I'm not a novelist.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Got this audiobook for a recent trip. It took me until the end to realize it was Robert Sean Leonard ("Dead Poet's Society" reading it. Anyway, I like Jane Hamilton. She doesn't sugarcoat anything. Here a teenager starts reading his mom's email and finds out she's having an affair. But he doesn't call her on it right away. Then the tale gets all twisty. There's an interesting subploat about the boy's younger sister and her hobby of dressing up as a Civil War reenactor.

[Kate W · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the story of a boy who reads his mom's emails and discovers she's having an affair. He is tormented with how to handle it. Very interesting. The sub-plot is of his sister's obsession with the civil war. She disguises herself as a boy to be able to participate in civil war reinactments.

[Amber · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got about halfway through and I'm giving up. Well-written, good story, but I just cannot stand the narrator. It's too bad. I'll never find out what happens. But at least I won't have that twerp's voice in my head anymore.