I grabbed this book off of the bookshelf in our home in India thinking it would be about the world or world travel. It couldn't be further from it! I still recommend it as a "good read" as it explores the dynamics of friendships and friendship survival over the non-survival of others...
It's a pretty quick read as well as the story continues to pull you in deeper and deeper into the confines of emotion, small town dynamics, and the roles that we play.

I never thought a book would be too bleak for me but wow, this was depressing lol

on Monday, May 31, 2004 I wrote:

I loved this book.After reading 3 pages I came to the shocking realisation that I had already read this book.I still don't know when, and how, where i have read it, but it did not really matter, cause i wanted to re read it anyway and it was very nice to do this in English.Loved the writing style of Jane Hamilton.I felt the fear and guilt of the main character.Thinking how I would react if I would have been in her shoes and I did not pay enough attention when i was babysitting and something would happen to the child.A Real Powerful book.thanks meshe

This is the third Oprah Book Club recommended book I have read that I felt lukewarm about. Sorry Oprah, I'm not taking recommendations from you again. Also rated as one of the best books of 1994...so '94 must not have been the best year in books.
This is a depressing story about a bad, whiny, lazy mother/partner who plays the victim for almost 400 pages. No redeeming qualities. Her husband is an even bigger snooze-fest character wise. I felt nothing for the characters, I was wanted the book to finish. I hate not finishing a book I've started. The writing was fine, the subject matter was just so tedious.

Too depressing for me. I read to the end, but did not enjoy the story.

i find it disturbing that, very often, the book i'm reading has the 'oprah's book club' designation boldly printed on the cover...
i am not now, nor have i ever been, a member of oprah's book club...
just to clear the air...

first impressions:
so far, i really appreciate the voice hamilton is developing for alice...her persona has a weight to it that lends a profundity to even the most prosiac statements...
she's like the people you meet that have been through a horrendous trauma; they have this odd serenity about them that makes their words heavier...as as a result, you feel compelled to listen more intently than you otherwise would...
it seems likely that hamilton is foreshadowing a serious traumatic event for alice...we'll see..

second:
well, i guess it didn't take a genuis to predict a catastrophe...
the one thing i'd like to point out again has to do with alice's voice and the narrative distance that hamilton manages to convey within it...alice is recounting an extremely horrible event, while her narration is clearly coming from a nebulous (doesn't she mention six years?) point in the future...this chronological distance makes the events that we as readers witness feel less severe without any perceptible loss of emotive pathos...
to me it seems a masterful combined use of voice and tense...

third:
this book is very much like listening to NPR...the voices of both howard and alice are so similar; their peculiarly remote, calm-yet-intense, declamatory modes recall the staid presentations of 'this american life' or any of the other myriad NPR style reportage pieces...
i find it hypnotic, not in a negative way, but in an entrancing, engrossing way...
the melancholy tone that results from all this could be too much for some, but i find it very effective and moving...i'm going to go ahead and give it 5 stars even though i'm not quite finished...

a heavy book, but a good one...the 5 stars will stand...

4.5 This is a beautifully written story laced with sadness. I found myself comparing my emotions to Alice, almost as if we were kindred spirits. How much despair can someone handle?

To me, the culmination of Alice's personality came to light in the second paragraph on page 285 . It is a long paragraph in which Alice is questioning everyone and everything--and placing blame on everyone and everything before finally settling on herself.

I do feel bad giving this book only two stars, because I do think Jane Hamilton is a VERY talented writer based on this work, but the first 100 pages really dragged on for me. I'm glad I stuck with it because I found the second storyline to be much more interesting, but I found myself distracted by the flowery language rather than engrossed in it.

Such a harrowing story, but I found it totally compelling. It shows how, in one brief moment of inattention, lives can be ruined. Not for those who do not like unlevened misery. It is well written, though perhaps a little wordy at times and draws a perfect picture of life in the American Midwest - not a place likely to attract anyone who reads this novel.

long and boring

I see in the other reviews that people found this book too depressing. That seems to be what people call most of the books and films I like. Haven't read this for years, but I saw the movie, which is also depressing, but slightly less so. Here's why I love the book so much: because it is about me. A person who doesn't really fit in; who is controlling and almost morbidly ethical. I think it's fair to say that this woman was somewhat out of her element in that town and then was pushed into a deep depression caused by her guilt over the child's drowning. From that point, she was basically out of her mind and did all kinds of self-destructive things and behaved in an inappropriate manner. Is this not what people do when they are at the end of their rope? You say to yourself, on some level, "I am a bad person and I deserve to be punished, so bring on the punishment." That's my take; and even though it's 20 years later and I am wiser I still have that person inside me, so the book is deeply personal to me.

I had high hopes for this book and none of them were met. The prose is bumpy and difficult to get into, and while the initial set-up of the book is horrific and intriguing, the story fails to advance, nor did I get a true sense of any of the characters, despite the lengthy passages of prose from the viewpoint of the two main characters. In the end there is no resolution, no indication of where these characters will end up after such a life-changing ordeal.