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Bound Lib/E
Antonya Nelson is known for her razor-sharp depictions of contemporary family life in all of its sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious complexity. Her latest novel has roots in her own youth in Wichita, in the neighborhood stalked by the serial killer known as BTK (Bind, Torture, and Kill). A story of wayward love and lost memory, of public and private lives twisting out of control, Bound is Nelson's most accomplished and emotionally riveting work.
Catherine and Oliver, young wife and older entrepreneurial husband, are negotiating their difference in age and a plethora of well-concealed secrets. Oliver, now in his sixties, is a serial adulterer and has just fallen giddily in love yet again. Catherine, seemingly placid and content, has ghosts of a past she scarcely remembers. When Catherine's long-forgotten high school friend dies and leaves Catherine the guardian of her teenage daughter, that past comes rushing back. As Oliver manages his new love, and Catherine her new charge and darker past, local news reports turn up the volume on a serial killer who has reappeared after years of quiet.
In a time of hauntings and new revelations, Nelson's characters grapple with their public and private obligations, continually choosing between the suppression or indulgence of wild desires. Which way they turn, and what balance they find, may only be determined by those who love them most.
Catherine and Oliver, young wife and older entrepreneurial husband, are negotiating their difference in age and a plethora of well-concealed secrets. Oliver, now in his sixties, is a serial adulterer and has just fallen giddily in love yet again. Catherine, seemingly placid and content, has ghosts of a past she scarcely remembers. When Catherine's long-forgotten high school friend dies and leaves Catherine the guardian of her teenage daughter, that past comes rushing back. As Oliver manages his new love, and Catherine her new charge and darker past, local news reports turn up the volume on a serial killer who has reappeared after years of quiet.
In a time of hauntings and new revelations, Nelson's characters grapple with their public and private obligations, continually choosing between the suppression or indulgence of wild desires. Which way they turn, and what balance they find, may only be determined by those who love them most.
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First published August 24, 2010
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About the author
Antonya Nelson
44 books97 followersAntonya Nelson is the author of nine books of fiction, including Nothing Right and the novels Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell. Nelson’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook, and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Grant, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and, recently, the United States Artists Simon Fellowship. She is married to the writer Robert Boswell and lives in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas, where she holds the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 226 reviews
November 10, 2010
Reviewed in the LA Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/...
One pleasure of reading Antonya Nelson is that she brings the careful language and control of literary fiction to uncontrolled, rough-and-tumble lives. Mixing the admittedly bourgeois undertaking of meticulously crafted prose with working class grit is risky — it can devolve into condescension or cartoonishness — but Nelson, like Raymond Carver, strikes a remarkable balance.
In "Bound," she turns her talents to a character study of three women who've crossed class lines. Catherine is a pretty, 40-ish wife in Wichita, Kan.; her husband, Oliver, is a successful local entrepreneur, decades older. Cattie is a teenager who leaves her Eastern boarding school with $500 in her pocket. Tying them together is Misty, Cattie's mother, who grew up poor and, despite their differences, was Catherine's best friend in high school and went on to name her daughter after her.
Catherine had "been brought up by people who asked how you were, what you wished to eat, where you were going when you left. Parents, in short," she recalls of her teenage years. "Misty lived among a different set of adults. They sent her on errands because they were too wasted to perform them themselves. They did not indulge girlish novelties like privacy or squeamishness, a diary or a fear of mice. Misty slept in a sleeping bag, like everyone else. Her earnings, from the Dairy Queen where she and Catherine both worked, went into the community pot."
Misty is seen mostly through the perspectives of her old friend and daughter because she is killed in a car accident in the book's opening pages. One question that drives the novel is how she went from being a disadvantaged teen to an affluent single mother who can afford to send her daughter to boarding school.
As a teen, Catherine was drawn to Misty as an outsider who was free and independent. As best friends, they engaged in heedless drinking, trailer park debauchery, hookups with much older men. While it seemed like dabbling in Misty's working-class world, there was real danger that Catherine only appreciates later.
"To realize how lucky she was to have survived her own incautious past always sent a shudder through Catherine — one red light, one inexplicable pill, one bad man, one unforgivable decision, and everything would have turned out otherwise."
Yet by the time she was out of college, Catherine had returned to the world of the middle class. The texture of her adult life is smooth. She tends her academic, imperious mother, in a nursing home after a stroke; she's the stepmother of a troubled daughter from one of Oliver's two previous marriages (his other daughter won't even speak to her father); she's a cheerleader for the staff of his businesses. She also provides the book's warmth, with her running narrative of memory that are at the novel's heart.
Cattie is more prickly. Like her mother, she is mostly a loner, and being sent to boarding school — for shoplifting, skipping class — didn't turn things around. Instead, with the help of one friend, she slips off campus to a low-end boarding house. There, she eventually befriends a young soldier, a careless falling-together that could easily be the kind of bad decision Catherine is thankful she never made.
This is an elliptical novel, one that cycles, at a slant, through the voices of these women and those close to them (including a beloved dog). For a time, Catherine's marriage takes center stage, as her husband, Oliver, gets his own chapters.
The twice-divorced, meticulous Oliver has a hard time emerging as anything more than a stereotype. Of course, he's having an affair, with a young woman he thinks of only as "Sweetheart," never by name. Of course, he has an ex-wife who hates him; not surprisingly, his daughters loathe him. His anxieties fail to carry the weight of the women in the book, who are much more complex, individual and unexpected.
Oliver does serve a purpose — he's an example of a different kind of bad man. Catherine's habit of dating older men was troubling when she brought a balding, trashy man to her prom — but Oliver is acceptable because he's wealthy, successful. He carries the imprimatur of class. There is just enough space in the text to wonder, however, if Catherine is actually any better off than Misty. She's comfortable, but is she happy? Misty had Cattie; Catherine has philandering Oliver and two corgis.
Past and present are united, in part, by the BTK serial killer, active in Wichita when Misty and Catherine were young and who emerged again in the mid-2000s, when the story takes place. He is not a bogeyman, waiting to jump out of the shadows, but a media presence, a metaphor for Catherine, Misty and Cattie's youthful hubris, for the danger lurking inside the ordinary.
Nelson's skills have been on display in her many short stories published by the New Yorker; "Bound" is her first novel in nine years. It is a work that resists the novelistic convention of having a climax, instead it eddies and returns. A year passes, and nothing much happens, other than the lines of these women's lives drawing together. But maybe sometimes a quiet understanding is enough.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/...
One pleasure of reading Antonya Nelson is that she brings the careful language and control of literary fiction to uncontrolled, rough-and-tumble lives. Mixing the admittedly bourgeois undertaking of meticulously crafted prose with working class grit is risky — it can devolve into condescension or cartoonishness — but Nelson, like Raymond Carver, strikes a remarkable balance.
In "Bound," she turns her talents to a character study of three women who've crossed class lines. Catherine is a pretty, 40-ish wife in Wichita, Kan.; her husband, Oliver, is a successful local entrepreneur, decades older. Cattie is a teenager who leaves her Eastern boarding school with $500 in her pocket. Tying them together is Misty, Cattie's mother, who grew up poor and, despite their differences, was Catherine's best friend in high school and went on to name her daughter after her.
Catherine had "been brought up by people who asked how you were, what you wished to eat, where you were going when you left. Parents, in short," she recalls of her teenage years. "Misty lived among a different set of adults. They sent her on errands because they were too wasted to perform them themselves. They did not indulge girlish novelties like privacy or squeamishness, a diary or a fear of mice. Misty slept in a sleeping bag, like everyone else. Her earnings, from the Dairy Queen where she and Catherine both worked, went into the community pot."
Misty is seen mostly through the perspectives of her old friend and daughter because she is killed in a car accident in the book's opening pages. One question that drives the novel is how she went from being a disadvantaged teen to an affluent single mother who can afford to send her daughter to boarding school.
As a teen, Catherine was drawn to Misty as an outsider who was free and independent. As best friends, they engaged in heedless drinking, trailer park debauchery, hookups with much older men. While it seemed like dabbling in Misty's working-class world, there was real danger that Catherine only appreciates later.
"To realize how lucky she was to have survived her own incautious past always sent a shudder through Catherine — one red light, one inexplicable pill, one bad man, one unforgivable decision, and everything would have turned out otherwise."
Yet by the time she was out of college, Catherine had returned to the world of the middle class. The texture of her adult life is smooth. She tends her academic, imperious mother, in a nursing home after a stroke; she's the stepmother of a troubled daughter from one of Oliver's two previous marriages (his other daughter won't even speak to her father); she's a cheerleader for the staff of his businesses. She also provides the book's warmth, with her running narrative of memory that are at the novel's heart.
Cattie is more prickly. Like her mother, she is mostly a loner, and being sent to boarding school — for shoplifting, skipping class — didn't turn things around. Instead, with the help of one friend, she slips off campus to a low-end boarding house. There, she eventually befriends a young soldier, a careless falling-together that could easily be the kind of bad decision Catherine is thankful she never made.
This is an elliptical novel, one that cycles, at a slant, through the voices of these women and those close to them (including a beloved dog). For a time, Catherine's marriage takes center stage, as her husband, Oliver, gets his own chapters.
The twice-divorced, meticulous Oliver has a hard time emerging as anything more than a stereotype. Of course, he's having an affair, with a young woman he thinks of only as "Sweetheart," never by name. Of course, he has an ex-wife who hates him; not surprisingly, his daughters loathe him. His anxieties fail to carry the weight of the women in the book, who are much more complex, individual and unexpected.
Oliver does serve a purpose — he's an example of a different kind of bad man. Catherine's habit of dating older men was troubling when she brought a balding, trashy man to her prom — but Oliver is acceptable because he's wealthy, successful. He carries the imprimatur of class. There is just enough space in the text to wonder, however, if Catherine is actually any better off than Misty. She's comfortable, but is she happy? Misty had Cattie; Catherine has philandering Oliver and two corgis.
Past and present are united, in part, by the BTK serial killer, active in Wichita when Misty and Catherine were young and who emerged again in the mid-2000s, when the story takes place. He is not a bogeyman, waiting to jump out of the shadows, but a media presence, a metaphor for Catherine, Misty and Cattie's youthful hubris, for the danger lurking inside the ordinary.
Nelson's skills have been on display in her many short stories published by the New Yorker; "Bound" is her first novel in nine years. It is a work that resists the novelistic convention of having a climax, instead it eddies and returns. A year passes, and nothing much happens, other than the lines of these women's lives drawing together. But maybe sometimes a quiet understanding is enough.
September 15, 2011
I’m a proud and vocal book abandoner. If, after giving it the official John Irving try (reading 100 pages in hopes the story gets going named after Irving because A Prayer for Owen Meany takes forever to get going), I’m not enjoying a book I set it aside without a second thought. This is why I don’t often write negative book reviews. Sometimes, though, I will struggle through a book because of some other obligation. Usually that means Rock & Roll Bookclub, and still even then I’ve been known to abandon books that are too bad to read (*cough*A Boy Called Freebird*cough*).
This is why I finished Antonya Nelson’s Bound even though I really didn’t want to.
Right from page one, I had my reservations. The book opens in the point of view of a dog who has just survived a car crash that’s killed its owner. We spend a lot of time with the dog, meeting characters who don’t seem to have any impact on the story. When we finally get to the humans the third-person point of view is so far removed, the book feels cold.
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This is why I finished Antonya Nelson’s Bound even though I really didn’t want to.
Right from page one, I had my reservations. The book opens in the point of view of a dog who has just survived a car crash that’s killed its owner. We spend a lot of time with the dog, meeting characters who don’t seem to have any impact on the story. When we finally get to the humans the third-person point of view is so far removed, the book feels cold.
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January 22, 2011
I was surprised to read that Antonya Nelson had written nine works of fiction but not surprised to find out that she teaches creative writing. "Bound" is full of great writing about character and background, but never seems to develop any story or characters. Incidents happen, characters interact. Their personal habits and behavior is laboriously described but it is difficult to feel any empathy for them. There is a theme here of people being bound together, and to their animals, but none of the characters develops and they hardly interact with the outside world despite the attempt to connect their personal history with the crimes of a local serial killer. Some of the writing was interesting but I found the book disappointing.
February 15, 2011
I received this book as a gift (not from GoodReads) but I almost didn't read it because I thought it was going to be something dreary and/or gory about a serial killer and a missing teen and I was just not in the mood for that.
However, the opening (told from a dog's point of view) pulled me in and I eventually discovered that this is a cleverly layered, beautifully written, and richly satisfying story told from the points of view of many interesting characters. It is "literary" so I found myself jotting down phrases that delighted me, but the author's skill with language is an enrichment to the storytelling, not a detriment. In other words, you don't get bogged down trying to figure out what is going on.
It is about a woman and a teen who find out that another woman (the teen's mom) died in a car accident. She left guardianship of her daughter to her best friend from high school, even though they have not been in touch since they graduated and she ran away from Wichita, Kansas, where the first woman still lives. The daughter runs away from her uncomfortable east coast boarding school when she hears that her mother is dead. The living woman tries to figure out how her once wild friend came to be a mother, and whether or not she (the still alive woman) wants to even deal with the missing teenager.
The serial killer plays only a small, mostly off-stage role as a figure in people's newspapers and imaginations, and there are only a few, brief descriptions of his actions. (Whew!) He serves as only one of many takes on the multi-faceted theme of being bound by friendship, family, marriage, pet ownership, and more.
I confess that I had never heard of Antonya Nelson before this, but now I want to see what her other books are like.
However, the opening (told from a dog's point of view) pulled me in and I eventually discovered that this is a cleverly layered, beautifully written, and richly satisfying story told from the points of view of many interesting characters. It is "literary" so I found myself jotting down phrases that delighted me, but the author's skill with language is an enrichment to the storytelling, not a detriment. In other words, you don't get bogged down trying to figure out what is going on.
It is about a woman and a teen who find out that another woman (the teen's mom) died in a car accident. She left guardianship of her daughter to her best friend from high school, even though they have not been in touch since they graduated and she ran away from Wichita, Kansas, where the first woman still lives. The daughter runs away from her uncomfortable east coast boarding school when she hears that her mother is dead. The living woman tries to figure out how her once wild friend came to be a mother, and whether or not she (the still alive woman) wants to even deal with the missing teenager.
The serial killer plays only a small, mostly off-stage role as a figure in people's newspapers and imaginations, and there are only a few, brief descriptions of his actions. (Whew!) He serves as only one of many takes on the multi-faceted theme of being bound by friendship, family, marriage, pet ownership, and more.
I confess that I had never heard of Antonya Nelson before this, but now I want to see what her other books are like.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 20, 2018
Antonya Nelson is not a bad writer, but this is a bad book. I stayed with it out of a perverse fascination to see how it finished. As I should have known, it finished disappointingly. The plot, such as it is, goes something like this: a woman dies in a car crash and is survived by a daughter who is at boarding school. The dead woman has named her childhood friend as the girl's guardian. The friend has mother in a nursing home and a philandering husband and they all live in Wichita, where the BTK serial killer is on the loose. Along the way there is a dog who was survived the car crash and a army veteran with PTSD who drives the girl home from boarding school. That's about it. None of the characters are interesting, none of these plot threads I have described are resolved. The girl and her guardian don't even meet each other until about 2/3 of the way through the book. Occasionally, there are glimmers, faint glimmers, of interesting characterization or wit, but they are snuffed out by the banality of the story more quickly than the BTK killer disposes of his victims.
December 14, 2010
For me this book was very hard to get into and read. I'm not quite sure why. The plot was good and I wish knew why I had such a hard time with it but no matter how much I've racked my brain I can't figure out what made it just ok for me. I will try to go back and re-read it and see if maybe I just me.
November 17, 2011
Had I not won this in a Goodreads giveaway, I would not have made it to the end, at which point the only conclusion I could reach was that sometimes life goes in full circles. This is a story largely about a Catherine--the third wife of a philandering entrepreneur--who essentially inherits the lone surviving child of friend who dies in an auto accident (suicide?), a friend from whom she hadn't heard in decades. On the road to fill in the blanks, we're asked to believe that this was a result of a pact made long ago, yet one that Catherine doesn't remember. (Something makes me think I'd recall offering to take care of a friend's offspring.) Not that this disturbs Catherine, who seems to view this as an opportunity to delve into a past not unlike other adolescents of her generation; the girls drank and partied together for years then grew apart. Is there anything novel about that?
We're not given any real reason to care about any of the characters in this book, including the just-orphaned daughter, who really doesn't seem to care about her own fate or well-being. I think much of this is the result of a narrator who tells how everybody feels about everything without really illustrating or demonstrating those feelings; we're told the characters' conclusions rather than being led to our own. What's more, author Antonya Nelson prose seems to labor needlessly in an effort to find new ways to describe things: "Teenage girls were graceless, moody, insecure, bad actors, annihilatingly melodramatic in the way of the suicide bomber: ready to claim collateral damage." Huh? Is that really what we think of teenage girls?
And for some reason the BTK Killer is wound into this. Don't ask me why. It's just one of the many questions left unanswered when I closed the book on "Bound." Pass.
We're not given any real reason to care about any of the characters in this book, including the just-orphaned daughter, who really doesn't seem to care about her own fate or well-being. I think much of this is the result of a narrator who tells how everybody feels about everything without really illustrating or demonstrating those feelings; we're told the characters' conclusions rather than being led to our own. What's more, author Antonya Nelson prose seems to labor needlessly in an effort to find new ways to describe things: "Teenage girls were graceless, moody, insecure, bad actors, annihilatingly melodramatic in the way of the suicide bomber: ready to claim collateral damage." Huh? Is that really what we think of teenage girls?
And for some reason the BTK Killer is wound into this. Don't ask me why. It's just one of the many questions left unanswered when I closed the book on "Bound." Pass.
August 23, 2010
I was so excited when I won this book from goodreads. Bound is a character-driven drama that keeps you reading even though it doesn't have much of a story line. Antonya Nelson is a very talented author that describes everything in such detail that you find yourself visualizing it. Nelson's characters were so vivid and unique. The beginning of the book was particularly well written and intense. This book followed the characters in their journeys through life, but the problem is none of the characters really learned or grew from their journeys. I particularly liked the ending where it said you weren't stuck with just one name, that there were choices that could change everything.
This book was a tad short and left me with some questions as to what happened to the characters, the most prominent question in my mind: Does Catherine ever find out about Oliver's affair and hook up with someone her own age? All in all, this was a good book and I'm glad that I got the opportunity to read it.
This book was a tad short and left me with some questions as to what happened to the characters, the most prominent question in my mind: Does Catherine ever find out about Oliver's affair and hook up with someone her own age? All in all, this was a good book and I'm glad that I got the opportunity to read it.
October 12, 2010
This was my first introduction to the work of Antonya Nelson. She is an excellent writer with sharply honed descriptive powers. I thought that parts of the book, particularly the beginning, were excellent set pieces. I subsequently discovered that the author is a well known short story writer. I will be looking for her collections of stories. Although this novel did not have the strongest narrative, I did not find the disjunctiveness to be a problem. It is always a pleasure to be introduced to new author with such a fine writing style. [I won this book through a giveaway drawing at Goodreads.]
December 2, 2010
“Cattie didn’t have friends, really. It seemed like so much work, having friends. From the moment she’d weighed the costs and benefits, Cattie had not consciously sought out the companionship of others” (22).
"Snowflakes had begun falling outside in festive complicity, covering the ugly, muting the unpleasant" (51).
"That would have been right up her very vengeful, extravagant ally" (88).
"Genetically, she'd be inclined to addiction; socially, toward unenlightened attitudes. Her mother's sympathy would not be for the girl herself, but for the larger doomed demographic the girl represented" (119).
"'I don't fell like I react the way other pdople do,' he confessed to her. 'I never have.'
'Me either,' she said.
'That'll cost you,' he said" (161).
"...the car's front end slanted decidedly downward as if disappointed or exhausted, resting on its chin" (162).
"Teenage girls required the full attention of everyone in the house; they entered rooms as if strutting onto a stage, the eye-catching star with the biggest coflict in the production that was All About Me" (177).
"...this was age, his enemy, now disallowing him the ability to quickly adapt, to sync up on thing with another, to rise from a deep sleep into sudden chaos without suffering the slow machinery of mind and body refusing to fire at command. Napping synapses, sluggish muscles" (180).
"The moon shone relentlessly on everything, a cold gleaming landscape that looked as if it were all made of glass and could be shattered" (181).
“ ‘And Misty kept flunking PE, so she ended up in Pregnant PE one semester. All they did was walk around the football field for an hour. Her and a bunch of fat black girls.’ Catherine slapped both hands over her mouth, looking around the empty hall in case there were fat black girls anywhere nearby to take offense” (197).
“She’d greeted Dr. Harding by putting her cheek to either side of the woman’s face, a strange gesture suggesting both Europe and felines” (210).
“Like Oliver, she’d been raised in the years following the Great Depression, back when ‘depression’ meant a national economic crisis, rather than a personal psychological one” (210).
“People of their generation, people who’d been raised on the prairie or in the Dust Bowl, who’d performed their jobs in service of the greater good, did not require a public airing of, or praise for, their feelings. A lot could be said for saying nothing” (212).
“Unlike most teenage girls, Cattie didn’t seem to think of herself as the star of the show so much as an audience member. Or maybe reviewer. She seemed to be taking notes” (218).
“Did all villains depend on the confidence that nobody else was as duplicitous as they?” (223).
“…treetops waving in the evening wind, limber trees in summer, leaves making the noise of water” (225).
"Snowflakes had begun falling outside in festive complicity, covering the ugly, muting the unpleasant" (51).
"That would have been right up her very vengeful, extravagant ally" (88).
"Genetically, she'd be inclined to addiction; socially, toward unenlightened attitudes. Her mother's sympathy would not be for the girl herself, but for the larger doomed demographic the girl represented" (119).
"'I don't fell like I react the way other pdople do,' he confessed to her. 'I never have.'
'Me either,' she said.
'That'll cost you,' he said" (161).
"...the car's front end slanted decidedly downward as if disappointed or exhausted, resting on its chin" (162).
"Teenage girls required the full attention of everyone in the house; they entered rooms as if strutting onto a stage, the eye-catching star with the biggest coflict in the production that was All About Me" (177).
"...this was age, his enemy, now disallowing him the ability to quickly adapt, to sync up on thing with another, to rise from a deep sleep into sudden chaos without suffering the slow machinery of mind and body refusing to fire at command. Napping synapses, sluggish muscles" (180).
"The moon shone relentlessly on everything, a cold gleaming landscape that looked as if it were all made of glass and could be shattered" (181).
“ ‘And Misty kept flunking PE, so she ended up in Pregnant PE one semester. All they did was walk around the football field for an hour. Her and a bunch of fat black girls.’ Catherine slapped both hands over her mouth, looking around the empty hall in case there were fat black girls anywhere nearby to take offense” (197).
“She’d greeted Dr. Harding by putting her cheek to either side of the woman’s face, a strange gesture suggesting both Europe and felines” (210).
“Like Oliver, she’d been raised in the years following the Great Depression, back when ‘depression’ meant a national economic crisis, rather than a personal psychological one” (210).
“People of their generation, people who’d been raised on the prairie or in the Dust Bowl, who’d performed their jobs in service of the greater good, did not require a public airing of, or praise for, their feelings. A lot could be said for saying nothing” (212).
“Unlike most teenage girls, Cattie didn’t seem to think of herself as the star of the show so much as an audience member. Or maybe reviewer. She seemed to be taking notes” (218).
“Did all villains depend on the confidence that nobody else was as duplicitous as they?” (223).
“…treetops waving in the evening wind, limber trees in summer, leaves making the noise of water” (225).
October 7, 2015
"Bound" was written in clear narrative style. That's the first thing that came to mind. Lately it has been all about authors trying to pass off their unique writing styles to make themselves and their books distinguishable. However, Antonya Nelson tried to steer away from that and stuck with the classic narration. I loved how the events, at first, didn't coincide with each other. But as the plot moved on, things started to fall into place. The story ran the entire course of a year (thus the changing of seasons that opened each part of the book), but the plot itself was short and compressed, and utterly simple. It was only Nelson's writing style that added garlands that the plot needed, helping the reader dive deeper into the characters' hearts.
The fact that I both liked and hated the most was the vocabulary. It's heavy and deep, and it sounded unrealistic if people sharing an average conversation in real life would really get into vocabulary as such. At first I highly doubted Nelson's actual knowledge of these deep words, like she just right-clicked in Microsoft Word on every simple word and looked up for some in-depth synonym of it to make it sound like she's all-knowing. But in the end, it got entertaining--her use of words, I mean--and I also got to touch up my vocabulary.
I liked the book and how it indirectly revolved around dogs. The first chapter alone had gripped me--it was the very heart of the novel, its taking place producing a ripple effect.
The fact that I both liked and hated the most was the vocabulary. It's heavy and deep, and it sounded unrealistic if people sharing an average conversation in real life would really get into vocabulary as such. At first I highly doubted Nelson's actual knowledge of these deep words, like she just right-clicked in Microsoft Word on every simple word and looked up for some in-depth synonym of it to make it sound like she's all-knowing. But in the end, it got entertaining--her use of words, I mean--and I also got to touch up my vocabulary.
I liked the book and how it indirectly revolved around dogs. The first chapter alone had gripped me--it was the very heart of the novel, its taking place producing a ripple effect.
March 9, 2012
I actually really liked this. If there was an option for half-stars, I'd give this 3.5 but since there is not, I'm going to round up.
You will not be interested in this book if you are looking for a plot-driven novel. This is a character-driven novel and the plot is almost secondary, really. I personally really like character-drive novels if the writing is done well and I would be hard pressed to say that Antonya Nelson does not do the writing well in this novel. I could see where her writing might not be to someone's taste -- long, almost stream-of-consciousness sentences - but I found her writing to be very rhythmic and her word choices excellent. I don't think this writing style is easy to pull off (see my massive dislike of Rain) but I found this work to be an effortless and smooth read.
You will not be interested in this book if you are looking for a plot-driven novel. This is a character-driven novel and the plot is almost secondary, really. I personally really like character-drive novels if the writing is done well and I would be hard pressed to say that Antonya Nelson does not do the writing well in this novel. I could see where her writing might not be to someone's taste -- long, almost stream-of-consciousness sentences - but I found her writing to be very rhythmic and her word choices excellent. I don't think this writing style is easy to pull off (see my massive dislike of Rain) but I found this work to be an effortless and smooth read.
February 21, 2016
This was just ok for me. It sounded more interesting than it really was, having the BTK Killer always lurking in the background. The writing was good; it kept me reading, expectant. However, I found that nothing really happened in the end, no big climax. People had problems, stuff happened and it all worked out ok in the end. I like my fiction to have a plot; I kept expecting something to happen. All of the characters had secrets the reader was aware of but they never became a part of the plot, making me wonder what the point was. I didn't connect with any of the characters and I do not like this type of pointless, almost forced, happy ending.
August 31, 2012
Very simply: One of the worst books I've ever read.
Character development could have been decent, if there was a plot. But the plot was weak (if not non-existent) and there were characters who had nothing to do with each other and had absolutely no value whatsoever.
This is one of those books where each page was torture and I couldn't' stop thinking, "Where is the author GOING with this?". The answer? Nowhere.
Character development could have been decent, if there was a plot. But the plot was weak (if not non-existent) and there were characters who had nothing to do with each other and had absolutely no value whatsoever.
This is one of those books where each page was torture and I couldn't' stop thinking, "Where is the author GOING with this?". The answer? Nowhere.
August 1, 2017
A no plot, rambling, no purpose novel. Every once in a while during the novel the author makes mention of a mass murderer. Unfortunately, it has no connection with the rest of the storyline. You will be hard pressed to identify a main character, or at least any you care about, as the story jumps from one character to another without very little association or context. What a waste of time. Skip it.
September 19, 2013
White women have problems, too, and they deal with them by getting matching tattoos on their ankles.
But this book also had dogs in it to sustain the length (she's more known for her short stories) that her vacant characters cannot. Prose craft continues.
Ad nauseam misspelled.
This is my review.
But this book also had dogs in it to sustain the length (she's more known for her short stories) that her vacant characters cannot. Prose craft continues.
Ad nauseam misspelled.
This is my review.
July 11, 2011
When I put this book down I didn't want to pick it back up again. Not at all what thought it was going to be about Bassein the jacket.
May 27, 2012
Geez, I tried. Several times, I tried. Just could not get into this book or connect with its characters.
February 3, 2015
Just discovered this author. I liked this book a lot and want to check out here other work!
March 5, 2017
This book holds a lot of promise but never really gets there. Catherine and Misty are friends at school from entirely different backgrounds. Misty is a wild child and together they do some edgy teenage stuff with men and drugs and the like. They part ways as they disperse to different schools and later in life Catherine, now married to a very unlikeable serial adulterer Oliver, becomes guardian to Misty's daughter Carrie. The development of the characters is a bit strange You build up Misty through Catherine's recollection and it seems far removed somehow. Opens with a dogs experience of the car crash that kills Misty, which I found very odd and involves some random characters that are never gone back to. Also it leaves you hanging at the end. All in all not a riveting read.
January 16, 2022
I read the whole book in case something very interesting happened or it got better, but... nope. The characters were ok, the narrative was ok, it was very frustrating to have some major players come in and then disappear with nary a word about them again. The end is especially anti-climactic, and the reference to BTK on the book jacket seems a red herring, the serial killer doesn't impact the story at all, it's just happening in the background of various characters' lives. Nelson can write, and there's a clear set of themes here (love, belonging, what makes us go back to people, places, behaviors, habits), but this was just okay.
February 3, 2018
Intersecting lives, the meaning of family, of love, and an analysis of what it means to be stuck vs. the ability to change your life. Peopled with real characters, whom you may not always like, but who feel fleshed out and complex. Lurking beneath the banal and not so banal encounters and daily living, an undercurrent of danger - from the return of a notorious serial killer to the ever-present dangers presented by the environment, the temperamental heart, and the tons of steel we often encase ourselves in under the allusion of control called driving. Very well written; highly recommend.
March 20, 2018
I enjoyed this book. It read more as a study of character than a plot driven story. Teenage rebellion often creates odd friendships. In this book a woman, who had a high school friendship with a girl from a very different background, learns of her friend's death. I won't say more so as not to spoil the suspense in the story. Suffice it to say that Nelson uses this situation to explore the different roads life takes old friends on. Very well written. I felt that I had gotten to know several characters.
February 20, 2019
What I liked most about this book is that it caused me to spend a number of days , when actually away from reading it, to ruminate on the title and it's multiple meanings. How do you define what binds you to another, and what do you owe them? An army buddy, a housemate, a pet, a family member, a spouse,an old friend from high school... Although the flow of the storytelling might miss the mark in a few areas, for me it was worth the read to consider the various relationships and all the forms one can experience in being "bound" to another.
May 13, 2019
I found this book in one of those sidewalk libraries while I was out one day in Redlands, California. As a native Kansan, I was attracted to the setting. Fast forward three years and I finally get around to reading it. Despite the lower reviews, I was pleasantly surprised.
This is the kind of book you sip, not devour. There is no strong plot, but there are many well developed characters, each one seemingly self-assured but actually uniquely vulnerable. Watching their lives intertwine and collide was fascinating. I would have loved to do a book club discussion with this one.
This is the kind of book you sip, not devour. There is no strong plot, but there are many well developed characters, each one seemingly self-assured but actually uniquely vulnerable. Watching their lives intertwine and collide was fascinating. I would have loved to do a book club discussion with this one.
August 11, 2021
I was disappointed with the lack of meaningful human interactions. In addition, though the author is from Wichita, Kansas, I have no understanding of why the BTK serial killer is part of this book. Kristi & Abby Tabby
August 28, 2024
I skimmed the last three chapters. This was a really hard read. The book started from a dog perspective and it ended with the dog’s perspective. I feel like so much more could be put into this book to make it more interesting for the storyline.
August 22, 2018
As per my 4 star review, I really liked this book. Still wrestling with the ending and trying to decide if I liked it but I think I'm just sad about leaving the characters behind.
September 27, 2019
Interesting...
February 23, 2020
I enjoyed some of the characters in this story and the way the author worked in the secondary story of the BTK killer, but ultimately I found it a bit dull in parts.
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