133,022
edits
Changes
From TheBookbag
Jump to navigationJump to searchNewest General Fiction Reviews (view source)
Revision as of 17:04, 21 August 2017
, 17:04, 21 August 2017no edit summary
[[Category:General Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|General Fiction]] __NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author= Gabrielle Zevin
|title= Young Jane Young
|rating= 4.5
|genre= General Fiction
|summary=Aviva Grossman, an ambitious Congressional intern in Florida, makes the life-changing mistake of having an affair with her boss - who is beloved, admired, successful, and very married - and blogging about it. When the affair comes to light, the Congressman doesn't take the fall, but Aviva does, and her life is over before it hardly begins. She becomes a late-night talk show punchline; she is slut-shamed, labelled as fat and ugly, and considered a blight on politics in general.How does one go on after this? In Aviva's case, she sees no way out but to change her name and move to a remote town in Maine. She starts over as a wedding planner, tries to be smarter about her life, and to raise her daughter to be strong and confident.But when, at the urging of others, she decides to run for public office herself, that long-ago mistake trails her via the Internet like a scarlet A. These days, Google guarantees that the past is never, ever, truly past, that everything you've done will live on for everyone to know about for all eternity. And it's only a matter of time until Aviva/Jane's daughter, Ruby, finds out who her mother was, and is, and must decide whether she can still respect her.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408709805</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Henrietta Rose-Innes
|summary= Perhaps the most overused phrase in fiction publishing is ''life-affirming'', closely followed by ''human condition''. The Shifting Pools takes this to a whole new level. Its blurb boasts that it is ''charged throughout with the beautiful urgency of life'', whatever that means. It isn't. And that's the problem. This isn't a bad book, but it sets itself up to fail. A cardinal rule of writing is ''focus on the small stuff''. If you set out to write a ''life affirming'' novel that answers all the ''big questions'', you'll struggle. And it is this trap that Zoe Duncan falls into. In her quest for profundity she loses her way.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1785630369</amazonuk>
}}
