I try to give any author my attention to be fair. There was never a connection for me, I gave up after many chapters, then skipping forward. Most of all I love reviewers that are personally honest just writing exactly how they felt about the read. I do not need a synopsis which can be found elsewhere.

A impressive novel, and a highly impressive first novel, all the more for being written by a twenty-something-year-old. I debate if a further star is called for, oh crazy system that is Goodreads.

Messud has a penetrating insight and the courage to tell a story with two not-terribly-sympathetic protagonists. The story, centered on two middle-aged, British-raised sisters as they clamor for a sense of firmness in their respective off-axis worlds, hasn't got a lot of plot, and as the end neared without any signposts for any sort of denouement to come, I braced for a disappointing ending. Astoundingly, Messud pulls off a stinging, reverberating conclusion from deceptively modest materials.

The novel certainly won't satisfy the event-hungry or even those who want to like the main characters. Both sisters are often repellant, but one emerges as surprisingly sympathetic despite her limits. Using a close third-person narration for each sister, the author refuses to editorialize or find excuses for them, or to bathe us in the comforts of hackneyed backstory. This purity of narration allows the book's ideas to rise to the surface, shining in the hard Australian light at book's end. Yet there are full lives lived here, and suffering fully dramatized. The writing is confident and well-crafted, but I sense the author holding back on her descriptions, especially for the sections taking place in Bali, to avoid the novel's becoming a book about beautiful sentences about lush locales, which wouldn't hold with the stories being told here. I have to respect that as well.

A rare, original achievement.

A depressing story about two sisters who have all the regrets about how they have lived their lives.

This is a first novel and it somehow seems incomplete. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it. I think comparisons to Barbara Pym are apt. It is a small novel- as though you are a voyeur of some small lives. I loved Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children, a novel written many years later and set in pre-9/11 New York. I would pick up that one first.

There's something in Claire Messud's writing that fascinates me to no end! Her writing is, of course, wonderful, and very often I have to look up words I don't know, but also that I never know what's going to happen next. And even though nothing extraordinary is happening, there's still the suspense of waiting . . .

Two sisters, one adventurous enough to leave England and start a life in Australia, the other "stuck" at home living with Mother. In middle age, the Australian goes on holiday to Bali and finds herself on the edge of an interesting, criminal, disintegrating, bohemian lifestyle with a charismatic central figure that compels her. Her proper life with a prominent husband has ended in divorce and this is a way for her to play-act for a while without really changing.

In the prologue, the sisters' mother peeks in at them as they are sleeping outdoors. It is such a tender moment. When we see her as an old woman, it's shocking to recall that she had such feelings for her children when they were young: "What she felt was a longing, in her limbs and her belly and in her spirit, for her daughters' futures, for every joy or triumph that swirled in their dormant imaginations as well as in her own." By old age, she bickers with her stay-at-home daughter, putting her down, and it's hard to reconcile those early aspirations for her children with her smallish view of them now. It created a feeling of longing in me, too -- for a bigger life, for time to pass fully.

Right now at the beginning, it could be a magical book. The language is not the language of a book. It is the language of a mind in motion, each word mattering in its own time. More when I go on further.

No detail is too small to be interesting, I learn from Claire Messud, and that the two huge ensembles which surround these two sisters as they live their separate lives are linked by the common themes and threads of their origins.

I am so confused by the supposed acclaim of this book! The description is inaccurate: "...only to become embroiled with a crew of international misfits and smugglers." You mean the dude who lets her stay with him rent free? The dude's kid who almost carried you up that mountain (the first of many anticlimactic scenes)? When she walks into the main house and says to K'tut something along the lines of "I guess there's no breakfast" I was done.

And Virginia. Her narrative and dialogue were so haughty and irritating. The homophobia was boring and dated, and the judgmental attitude got old real fast.

I think the last few pages sum it up, in that they don't at all. They learn no lessons. They don't find themselves. I won't even mark this as having spoilers, because nothing happens. They still barely interact or enjoy each other. It's like two short stories of people who are not at all related, both stories meandering and pointless.

This is the debut novel of Claire Messud, who has gone on to have a career as a novelist and creative writing teacher. She has a sharp eye for people and for places, be it London or Bali. The women in this story, a mother and two daughters, all seem to be embarking on the same quest, but they are undertaking that quest in different ways. I wanted to like the characters more than I did, particularly Emmy, the younger sister. That takes a certain type of courage, as a writer, to write about characters who are so flawed and real. I admire Messud's talents, and I look forward to reading more of her novels.

i feel great remorse giving a claire messud novel 2.5 stars, but while her characters in the woman upstairs may have inspired vitriol among readers, the characters of when the world was steady don't inspire much of anything.

I found the story plodding and difficult to get into.