Darius

Unremitting grimness

Revisado: 06-15-18

I honestly couldn't get past the first half of this book. I couldn't deal with the anxiety it saturated me with.

It seems obvious where things are going and I felt tense and anxious as I listened to every chapter. There would be a glimmer of hope for protagonist Lennie but her mother, Cora, would always, unfailingly, defend the antagonist, her violently abusive ptsd (Nam pow) husband, Erndt, and allow her life to be controlled by fear, even though Lennie wanted to work on ways to get out from under her father's pathological abuse and, really, imprisonment of her family. When Lennie graduates from the tiny high school in their remote Alaskan town, her father refuses to allow her to go and celebrate her graduation at a town-wide party honoring her and the other student in her class because he so passionately hates the "patriarch" of the town, Tom Walker, and is inconsolably full of rage at him for his wealth, generosity, and forward vision for the town's economy.

Lennie hopes to go to college, but I just don't have a good feeling about the possibility of that happening.

Anyway, I am not sure I will finish reading this book because it is, as the title says, unremittingly tense, anxious, and grim. There are no joyful, carefree days. It's just too much to take. And I am not a "happy endings" sort of person - I like complex plots that don't always end with all the loose ends tied up. But this book so blatantly lacks hope that I don't feel like I can stick with it. Reader beware. It is possible that this is an accurate picture of what it is to be held hostage by an abusive husband and I am being insensitive to the reality of it. But given that the caring and supportive townspeople know what Erndt does to his wife, and how he holds his 18-year-old daughter hostage, it surprises me that they don't intervene more than halfheartedly, or even just swoop down and kill the guy, or at least rescue the girl. As I said, I haven't read the whole thing, and maybe something redeeming happens before the book ends, but given the trajectory of the first half, I am not feeling a lot of hope for that.

I guess good literature can include things that make you feel what a victim of PTSD and domestic violence experience, but my life is complicated and hard enough without that vicarious suffering.

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Good story, bad narration

Revisado: 07-30-09

This story is engaging but the narrator obviously has no idea how to pronounce Iranian names and words. The way Iranians say "Iran" is "ee-RON" not "i-RAN", and people from Iran are "eeRONians" not "i-RAINians." Listening to "A Thousand Splendid Suns" was such a pleasure because middle eastern (in this case Afghani) names and words were perfectly pronounced, but in "The Rooftops of Tehran," the poor pronunciation is distracting and almost caused me to give up on it.

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