Kitson Broadbelt

Bad.

Revisado: 04-14-25

This was just bad. My daughter loves the series and I read “Sunrise” for her but I don’t think even she can defend this. Vacuous and endless colloquialisms instead of sharp characterization. Vapid and predictable plot points instead of sharp storytelling. I think they hired some hack to write this.

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Why So Many Recommendations?

Revisado: 07-17-24

It seemed this was written by and read for an excitable child. I do not remember feeling this way with “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

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Disappointing. But I still miss him.

Revisado: 08-09-22

Read “A Sport and a Pastime.” Or any of his essays for Esquire magazine. Always elegant and efficient. This, his last novel, was not.

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Scratching at the wound, making it deeper

Revisado: 08-02-22

Watching a protagonist endure an almost unremitting march of indignities and injustices, frustrations and failures is a terribly demoralizing experience. Like watching “Breaking Bad” only without the successful drug enterprise. Just a basically decent middle aged man humiliated, abandoned, misunderstood, betrayed, rejected, ostracized, and finally losing everything.
Is it ironic or tone deaf that the poisoned and fractious nature of our current country is discussed a lot? Is it a purging or a death rattle to ultimately, so seamlessly, join in the violently suicidal noise of 21st Century America?
I really could have done without this.

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Ghastly public weeping could result.

Revisado: 05-13-21

I was going to write “uneven” because Mr. O’Brien, while often perceptive and/or profound in this book, is just as often obvious or cloyingly blinkered by his paternal tsunami of feeling. But I just finished the damned thing and have been hopelessly crying for an hour (at least half of which had to happen as I was stupidly listening to the conclusion while shopping in Target). When I was young and foolish I thought Swinburne was talking about fickle paramours when he wrote I have lived long enough to see that love has an end. There is something so much more awful to contemplate. And old parents have to scuffle with it every goddamn day: that an hour will come when you can no longer love because you will be gone. As emotional and uneven as it is, it is also a FIERCE testimony of an old man’s pervasive love of his two boys. He knows all is mutable but he makes his declaration anyway. As maybe the purest act of love is making a fight for it when you know the fight will inevitably be lost.

I give Mr. O'Brien five performance stars for reading this damned thing to the end without once dissolving into unbridled blubbering.

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Sort of about mosquitoes.

Revisado: 03-04-21

Condescending anthropomorphizing and muddled adjectives. “Mercenary mosquitoes” may be alliterative and nominally cute but it’s still not an actual thing and certainly shouldn’t be tossed out approximately once per page in the first half.

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Bad Casting

Revisado: 02-11-21

A female who could sing should have been the narrator. For a story so much about music, it was distractingly impoverished to have all the songs read in a flat male voice.

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Shattering

Revisado: 01-23-20

At first, I thought the sound of Toni Morrison’s lilting voice—like light from a reposeful, determined fire—would be the only thing in the world to help me sleep through the night.
Her story made me understand that that was only going to happen if I cried myself to slumber.
Still, thank you.

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