Monday, January 26, 2009

2009 book 23

Zoe Heller's The Believers
Heller's followup to the bestselling Notes on a Scandal will probably do pretty well, sales-wise, though I didn't think it was that great of a book. It's about what happens to a politically active family after their patriarch, a well-known lawyer, suffers stroke, and secrets emerge, and whatnot. The problem is that most of the characters are kind of assholes (save for insecure, unhappily married daughter Karla) and the youngest daughter's exploration of Orthodox Judaism really annoyed me (maybe b/c I've read too many books on the topic, or maybe b/c it feels like a writer trying to figure out how someone exploring a religion might feel--it seems inauthentic to a large degree). Now that I think about it, I didn't really like her last book much either. B/B-.

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