Julia Alvarez's Saving the World
This novel starts off strong, focusing on a 50-year-old novelist who's struggling to write a sequel to one of her previous books, and is distracted by a story of an expedition to provide a smallpox vaccine to Central America in the early 1800s. The novel-within-a-novel mostly works, but the novelist's story descends into melodrama and pointless tragedy quite suddenly, and it just didn't work for me. I hesitate to give anything by Alvarez a mediocre grade, but this is my least favorite of her novels. B-.
4 comments:
Was it you who read The End of Mr. Y? I just finished it, and I can't remember where it was I saw a review.
You may have seen a review somewhere else too, but I definitely read it--it was one of my favorites of 2006!
Did you like it?
I did like it - but I found the mix of sex and science a little disconcerting!
(and that the men in the book wanted our heroine so desperately, despite the fact that she didn't seem to take a shower for the majority of the book)
i didn't notice the shower thing, and am slightly perturbed now.
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