Thursday, June 09, 2011

2011 book 143

Jean Thompson's The Year We Left Home
Thompson tells the story of a family of Iowans--four siblings and their Vietnam vet cousin--from the 1970s through the early 2000s. Each chapter presents a scene in the life of one of them (mostly Ryan, who escapes Iowa for Chicago) moving up through time (but they're not really self-contained stories or anything). I liked the structure well enough, but some of the characters just didn't come to life for me, and I really wasn't interested in Ryan at all, so having him as a focal point was kind of eh. Not that it's a bad book, I just found my interest waning as it moved on. B.

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