We have spent three-quarters of this hefty novel in the company of Iris, inhabiting her orbit as she navigates her memories. Even the disruptive excerpts from Laura’s novel feel familiar now. We’ve grown comfortable with those two unnamed lovers, and the ceaseless shift of settings (always a new rented
Through the first quarter of the novel, I was thinking of this as the story of two lovers. My take would’ve failed the Bechdel test, and I think, now, it’s really a tale of two sisters: Iris and Laura Chase. The girls would have passed, I think: even when
“It’s November; it’s almost bedtime”—in autumn 1919, when older Iris remembers reading her ABCs as a child, and determines that she’s never been the kind of person who could drive off a bridge. Neither she nor her mother was that sort, but her father could have and, it seems
Sometimes summer is a slow reading time for me, but this year? The opposite! The stacks were swelling in May and June, and every flat surface was cluttered with books begun-but-unfinished, and I didn’t have a chance to think about what else I might do…so, I read.
Now that it’s July, I’m re-examining the goals I had in mind earlier this year, checking to see whether my plans have aligned with my reading choices so far. A few days ago, I wrote about one of my slow-reading projects this year, and in a few days
