Esme Stays With You For a Long Time!!!

books:


	• The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox Maggie O'Farrell Harcourt, 2007 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 54 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Esme Stays With You For a Long Time!!!

I absolutely loved the book! Her style of writing is full of details and loose ends that she ties beautifully throughout the book. All your questions from the past do get answered. Some about the future will be left up to you, but that's ok. It is not the important part of the book!
If there were more stars I would give this book a 10! The story is very powerful and the characters will stay with you for a long time. Happy reading.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

I found this book fascinating. It was well written. The only negative was the timeline; switching back and forth between past and present was at times difficult to keep up with. However, the story was very interesting. I did not want to put this book down! It generated one of the best discussions my book club has had.

for more information click here

Flawed but devastating

SPOILERS ALERT: This book tracks, out of chronological order, the destructive effect an intolerant, narrow-minded family has not only on their scapegoated daughter, who may have some sort of learning disability (perhaps ADHD) but is hardly psychotic--at first--but also on their favored daughter. As others have pointed out, you can guess most of the "secrets" well ahead of the end if the book, but I don't think that's its point. I think it's more that the evil parents do lives after them, and Kitty's compounded failures towards Esme seem may be initiated by romantic rivalry, but that's just the trigger after years of accumulated frustration of being unable to protect her from either parents or bullying schoolmates--eventually Kitty just identifies with the aggressors and accepts the conventional view of all things, including Esme. The consequences for Esme are horrific, particularly when we can guess that if she entered art school or drama school she'd probably fit right in, but Kitty's marriage and future happiness are also doomed by her inability to rebel, just as Esme is doomed by her inability to comply. The book explores how when one family member is scapegoated, other members are also permanently damaged by being forced to witness or participate in the scapegoating: nobody wins. The readers who view the ending as someone who "got away with it" for years finally getting just deserts have missed the point that this tragedy was set in motion years ago by parents and doctors who got young girls to say what they wanted to hear, and then left them to bear the consequences. And as tempting as it is to stop there, one need only refer to Larkins' "This Be the Verse" to see that the damage affects more than one generation.
If anything, the book reminds me of _Wuthering Heights_: it also flashes back and forth in time, we don't know who is who at the beginning or how the situation came to be as it is when we begin, and we see how several generations are marred by poisonous family relations and bullying. WH at least offers the possiblity that some things are resolved or transcended by death, but in _Vanishing_ we are not even offered that frail hope.

for more information click here

Esme and The Inconvenient Wife

A friend recommended this book because I had enjoyed Megan Chance's novel about a woman, who was committed to a mental hospital by her husband, that was set over 50 years earlier. An Inconvenient Wife and O'Farrell's novel both show how upper class women were forced to conform---or pay a terrible price. Some of the treatments for hysteria in the mid-nineteenth century are still used today.
What I enjoyed the most was piecing together the fragments from Kitty's demented ramblings and Esme's recollections. The author uses Kitty's Alzheimer's-type thoughts---giving us incomplete or misunderstood ideas that are only fully comprehended when we have learned the facts from Esme's perspective. I like having to think while I read.
I think this compares to The Madonnas of Leningrad because of the use of Alzheimer's thought patterns to unravel a woman's life story. We get the parts given to us and we have to put the puzzle together.

for more information click here

reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

hot

not?

What's your opinion?

Write a review and share your thoughts!

search for books
vanishing act, act, esme, lennox, vanishing

Impressum / about us