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The Birdhouse (2011)

by Kelly Simmons(Favorite Author)

3.63 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0719523621 (ISBN13: 9780719523625)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

John Murray Publishers

review 1: I read this book in one day and was interested enough to finish but in the end cannot really recommend it. It is the tale of Ann a 73 year old woman who is said to be starting to have symptoms of alzheimers, a disease which killed her mother. It alternates between present day Ann and her diary as a young wife and mother in 1967.The problem I had was that neither Ann nor any other character in the book is a nice person. Ann herself is cold, and described not caring for her children, and then not caring about her granddaughter Ellie until she was 8 years old. Ann's daughter in law is humorless and mean, the men are all one dimensional.We hear from the beginning that Ann is forgetful and has dementia, but there are little to no signs of this. She forgets one or two things ove... morer the course of a summer, but how is that different than any one else? It also is mentioned that her mother had been confined in a nursing home from age 50 on, but the information is presented as though it is a natural occurrence for one to have dementia at age 50. All of the women in the book cheat on their husband too and we cannot really understand why because everything is from Ann's viewpoint and she is just not a nice narrator.
review 2: This is one of those books where I ask myself, "Is it me? Almost all the other reviewers like this book a lot. Am I missing something they saw?" Here are my problems with it. First, the reviews did give me an expectation that this would be a wonderful book, so the fact that I felt it was only "OK" was a letdown. Second, the first chapter sets the reader up to expect some dark revelation and gain of some deep self-awareness by the narrator. I don't think it delivered on that promise. The elements of story are, in my opinion, trite. Once I got far enough into the book to realize it wasn't going to be the book I had thought it would be, I knew all the "secrets" and small awarenesses that the narrator, Ann, would come to. I knew them fairly early into the book, so the rest of the book was simply confirmation. Last, I wanted beautiful prose. Sadly, this book didn't have any. The writing sounded like that of an inexperienced and not very talented writer's. It also sounded like something written for a Young Adult audience, though I cannot see young readers being able to relate to the narrator. I'm not knocking that audience---YAs can be sophisticated readers. I mean that the language seemed consciously geared down to a young reader's level. It's not a book I'd recommend to my reading buddies, and it didn't encourage me to read anything else by the author. less

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