Author: Lenore H. Dovrkin
Grade: 70/100
The premise is this: Elizabeth Nye who has led a fairly conservative life, becomes engaged in a torrid affair while separated from her fiancé. This affair leads her into a tangle of lies and interesting situations. Without giving much away I will just tell you that the book is about relationships and infidelity, sibling rivalries, familial tensions, and the concept of generational dysfunction.
Dvorkin, a teacher in Colorado, takes on these topics in this fictional novel and writes with the confidence and clarity of someone who has lived these stories. Her characters, especially Elizabeth, felt real, her personality jumping off the page. Her dialogue comes across naturally, which not all writers, even the most famous of them, do with such ease. Even more impressive is the way is the poetic descriptive narrative that she dresses this story in. She uses the perfect amount of descriptive narrative to help the reader paint a picture in their head, but refrains from going overboard and lulling the reader to sleep with poetic prose like so many artists do; getting caught up in their own egos, unwilling to stop typing and let the story just tell itself. Dvorkin does not suffer this problem.
Pg.246 He sat back down on the couch with his feet up and tucked the afghan around them. The tea was very hot. He sipped it slowly, taking little bites of the toast in between. He wanted to draw this out, to give himself time to think.
Here, as with most of the novel, Dvorkin tells us just enough to picture this in our head. And given where we are at this point in the story, we understand perfectly why he (Brian) wanted to draw out the process, why he was lost in thought.
The only negative of this novel is that the plot was disjointed in places and it ran a little long in spots. However, the bright spots far outweigh the negatives. I’d definitely recommend this as a read for anyone who enjoys love stories and coming of age stories. I wouldn’t put this novel into any specific genre, because it did a good job of avoiding clichés, but people like comparatives when making decisions on a purchase. Thus, I’ve put it in those categories for you.
