Rating: 
Summary: Ugh!
Review: I HATED this book. I couldn't stand any of the characters, and for me, that is the most important part of enjoying a book. How am I supposed to get into the book if I hate all the characters and can't identify with any of them? I do NOT recommend this book to ANYBODY except masochists.
Rating: 
Summary: an annoying chore.
Review: I have for the most part stayed away from Oprah's book club selections. I have found in general that the story lines are as follows....I was raped, I was poor, I was raped again and then somebody died. I decided to ignore my instincts and gave Songs in Ordinary Time a go. This book should be re-titled "All the Things That Could Go Wrong In a Small Town For 800 Pages" This book was relentless almost to the point of being humorous. There was no pinnacle, no point and then the book was done. I suppose life is often that way too.....so if you live a life of miserable and quiet desparation and you would like a little more of the same read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Deeply disappointed
Review: This book was a terrible disappointment. It's decidedly anti-Catholic bent made for a disturbing read. I've lost a lot of respect for the judgement of Oprah, or those who select the books for her club, in this selection. I've not been entirely impressed by all the club's selections but this one was particularly poor. The gross descriptions and disfunctional characters weren't worth the time it took to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Begins and evolves as ordinary..but !!
Review: An extraordinary book, that begins and evolves slowly and as the story unfolds it seems terribly ordinary as in the title. But beneath the prose lies an extraordinary understanding of her characters that claims your attention so that you must continue and finish reading the book to discover where they end up. I'm satisfied that I completed reading it, but at times I found it hard going. If your looking for suspense or thrills, forget it for this is an awesome book about ordinary people that live in an ordinary town living for the most part ordinary lives. One vulnerable but fascinating family have the misfortune to encounter a life sucking salesman that they can't seem to shake off. But it ends beautifully in the end, it just took quite some perservarance to get there. Worth the trouble though so I gave it four out of five. Writer perhaps has her best writing ahead of her.
Rating:
Summary: Uh....
Review: I only managed to get about a chapter and a half into this book. I set it down to answer the hpone, and never bothered to pick it back up. It just didn't grab me, I didn't care about any of the characters enough to want to read any further.
Rating:
Summary: Give me a break!
Review: Seven hundred and fourty (yes 740) of the most painful pages that I've ever read. I only finished it because I believed that something-anything good HAD to happen to someone in this book. The end (if you can call it that) was completely unsatisfying. Morris is a good writer but she created not a single character (and there were a lot of them) in this book that I cared about.
Rating:
Summary: Songs in Ordinary Time
Review: This is not a great book by any means; the characters have very few redeeming qualities and for the most part you don't really like them. But, strangely, I was drawn to finish this book to see what happened. I could not read it for very long without having to put it down, though, because the characters and their existences are so depressing. I was especially disturbed by the mother, Alice, who can't seem to see that her troubles are of her own making, and who psychologically and verbally abuses her children. The whole Presto Soap scam was so implausible that I felt certain that Morris must have had some other intention in dragging it on for so long. You kept hoping that Alice would get some sense and finally see what was going on. Her youngest son, Benjy most depicted the result of Alice's psychological and verbal abuse on the children; very scary. All in all, I have to say that it was a fascinatingly disturbing read.
Rating:
Summary: Spellbinding!
Review: To me, the book was hard to get interested in at first but the more I read it, the harder it was to put down. The author did a superb job of showing how hard it is for a woman raising a family of her own, letting the reader know of the struggles the mother went through to raise her children. How true to life it is because some women seem to attract men who want to set themselves up in their lives only to take advantage of their good natures.
Rating:
Summary: Hard to put down, but...
Review: If you are looking for an engrossing story with great characters, this is a must read. At first it was a challenge to keep all of the characters straight, but I grew to like the quick changing of points of view. The characters made me laugh, cry, and worry about them. I just wanted to give Benjy a hug! The end was a bit disappointing for me because I felt cut off too abruptly from the plot. I was left wondering what happened to them all...
Rating:
Summary: A Frustrating Read...
Review: I had high hopes for this book, but it missed the mark. In fact, I was hard pressed to finish it. In Songs in Ordinary Time, it's 1960 in Atkinson, Vermont. The story centers on Marie Fermoyle and her children, Alice who is 16 years old and discovering her sexuality - first with the Police Chief's son and then with a visiting priest, Norm who is hot headed, and Benjy who is 12 years old - ignored by his family, and can't quite figure out what the shameful, nameless "sticky warmth" that unexpectedly appears in his pajama bottoms in the morning, so he sleeps in a towel. As the story opens, we meet The Judge, but he's dead. His housekeeper lets him stay propped up in the window, refusing to admit he's dead until he starts to get quite ripe. The rest of the story is about greed, and the human desire to believe that someone can come along and solve all your problems for you. And how badly we want someone to solve our problems, that we ignore the fact that he may be a slick talking, murdering, thief. This book had such gross and dark images that I just did not like it. I made myself finish the book, but it was difficult.
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