Book Review: 'My Name is Lucy Barton' by Elizabeth Strout

I finished this book a fortnight ago, but just getting round to finally reviewing it. It's really quite a short book, so didn't take me too long to read. I bought it over the summer in my frenzy of book buying, because I had seen it on display a lot, the blurb sounded good, and it is a really beautiful book to pick up, with lovely thick cream paper and understated yet striking cover, not to mention the perfect book smell (ok, I'm gonna stop the weirdness and move on!).

Brief Summary: Lucy Barton is a married mum of two young girls, who is in hospital in New York following a major surgery. One day, she waked to see her mother by her bedside. The mother she has not seen in many years. As the pair chat and story tell, Lucy recollects her rural childhood of poverty, and the quirky little details that brought her to where she is now and, later on, beyond.

Other than the hospital setting and the introduction of the mother, there isn't exactly a plot to this book. Rather, it's a reflective collection of tales from the narrative viewpoint of the central character, Lucy. While many of the details to which Strout includes (and often gives a lot of space to) may, on their own, appear to be a bit trivial or small,  each contributes to this wonderful truthful story which really makes you feel the emotions of the narrator, and, for me, brought a real element of nostalgia out.

In fact, towards the end of the book, I really regretted sitting reading it in public, because the combination of these emotional family tales and being away from home had me a bit choked up!

This is a short review, because it's a short book and I didn't really have anything about it that I didn't like. I really urge all of you to pick up a copy. Not a long read but well worth it. Truly beautiful writing.




Reading Challenge: 15/21

Film Review: Everything Everything

I imagine this will be a short review, as its now been 6 weeks since my friend and I went to see this!! But those of you who read my review of this book (available here) earlier in the summer will know that I really enjoyed it and was keen to see the film when it was available in the UK.

I was a bit confused by the release date, as I think it was pushed back from June to August, and the film wasn't being shown in many cinemas. However, we opted for this over Dunkirk (opinions? Did we make a bad choice missing that?) as we were more in the mood for a romantic drama than a war film! Like little kids, we stocked up on CandyKing and took our seats.

I wasn't really sure what to expect from this film, considering it was such a short book. It didn't really strike me as the type to make for an action-packed film. I won't bother with a 'brief summary' as there's one in my book review post, and the film stuck fairly accurately to the story.

Actually, despite being a low-action film, they had in fact added to the plot to bulk it up a bit! It was interesting to chat to my friend about it afterwards, as the book was still fairly fresh for me, whereas she had never read it.

I thought the acting was really good, I particularly liked Amandla Stenberg as Maddie and Nick Robinson as Olly.

I felt as though the story portrayed very truthfully the awkwardness of growing up and painted an accurate image of 'coming of age', however my friend felt the plot was a bit far-fetched, as she prefers to be able to believe that the events would happen in real life, and to be honest I didn't totally disagree with her. I certainly noticed a kind of 'airbrushed' effect throughout the film, whereby every scene looked like it had been filtered! I'm not sure if this was deliberate, due to the insanely clean life Maddie must live or the dream-like quality of the events that occur, but it was a bit odd and made it hard to feel fully immersed in the lives of the characters.

Overall, I thought the film was a good reflection of the book and a nice film for a Sunday late-evening with my bestie, but possibly wouldn't make my list of favourite films.