Rating: 
Summary: A mean-spirited little book
Review: I have never written a review for a web site before, but this book SO annoyed me that I felt I had to. I only just read "The Shipping News," and was delightfully suprised -- and somewhat bewildered by some of the amazon.com reader-reviewers (granted, a minority) who hadn't liked the book. And then I read "Accordion Crimes"! Despite the occasional textual fireworks and clever turns-of-phrase, this is a mean-spirited, condescending book. I don't think that an author can be expected to "like" all of his or her characters (and what boring reading it would make if they did!), but he or she should at least "respect" them. E. Annie Proulx, in this book, treats her characters like animals in a zoo, or in some nature film. She describes them, their habits and foibles, and, almost without exception, their awful ends -- but as if she was somehow above them, looking down on them. As if she thinks that she is somehow superior to them. There is no attempt to uncover their humanity, no respect for the human condition. Just a smug, condescending tone. Even her little gimmick, her little plot device, is offensive. In "The Shipping News," she used the little headlines that Quoyle would make up in his head as a way of helping us get to the character's emotional heart, as a way of making us understand what makes him tick. The fact that most of them were funny, or at least worth a chuckle, was a bonus. In "Accordion Crimes," she often ends a vignette with a synopsis, enclosed in parenthesis, that sums up the rest of a character's life, once they are "off stage" as far as the novel is concerned. While some of these are funny, too, they are always funny at the expense of the character. Reducing him or her to a punch line in a joke. In "The Shipping News," the only real, multidimensional character was Quoyle. Like Daphne DuMaurier's nameless lead character in "Rebecca," we learned more about the character by how he/she perceives events around him/her, using other characters as a mirror. In "Accordion Crimes," there are no characters, only caricatures. In a sweeping novel like this, with a simple plot device (the famous little green accordion) to lead us to new characters and new situations, one would have hoped for a rich tapestry of humanity. Instead, we get a couple of hundred pages of ethnic stereotypes and jokes. Think of what an author like Steinbeck or Dickens or Victor Hugo could have done with a scenario like this. There would have been characters whom we loved, characters whom we hated, but, most of all, characters who helped us to understand our common humanity. The whole point of "The Grapes of Wrath" was that we, the readers, had no right to feel superior, to think ourselves better than a bunch of illiterate migrant farm workers. Their struggle was our struggle. Their humanity was our humanity. Read "Accodion Crimes" if you suffer from such low self-esteeem that you need to feel superior to every single character, if human foibles and frailty give you a smug sense of superiority. If you want to read about human beings, if you want to learn more about the human condition and what we can learn from one another, use the amazon-com search engine to find another book!
Rating: 
Summary: A monumental disappointment
Review: After The Shipping News, I couldn't wait to read Annie Proulx's latest. She had been able to grasp a unique Canadian culture of Newfoundland so well, I expected more of the same or better in Accordian Crimes. This is not a book, just a weak collection of depressing and unsatisfying short stories that do nothing to create empathy with the characters. Not a character here you would want to meet. The theme: the American dream unmasked is a good one. No plot, no unifying idea other than the little green accordian which moves along as each owner dies or loses it. I had to force myself to finish it. If this had been Annie Proulx's first book, no one would buy the next.
Rating:
Summary: Start To Finish Took One Year!
Review: I COULD put this book down. And did, often. While I savored sentences and paragraphs, the chapters seemed endless, aimless, often gruesome enough to make me turn away. Too many lives, journeys, details breaking into separate pieces in one book. I have great faith that her next book will be a return to excellence.
Rating:
Summary: A long and rambling tale that loses the reader
Review: While the beginning of E. Annie Proulx's novel, Accordion Crimes starts off well, the reader is quickly lost as the accordion moves from one miserable owner to another. I truly was bored by this book, but did finish it.
Rating: 
Summary: A Cultural Awakening
Review: Once again, Ms. Proulx has created an extraordinary American tale using an inanimate object (in this case, a hand-made green accordion instead of sailor's knots) to tie her characters together. It is necessary to pay close attention while reading this book, as the characters change each time the accordion takes on new ownership. Although the story starts in Italy, where the instrument is made, it makes its way across the sea to New Orleans on to Maine and Quebec, Mississippi, Chicago and elsewhere. The owners are a multitude of immigrants as diversified as the places to which the accordion goes. Reading this book is a cultural (and geographical!) learning experience-a foray into the darker, aspects of how America mistreats its foreign émigrés and how they, in turn, mistreat one another
Rating: 
Summary: grim, but mesmerizing
Review: I have to confess this isn't a book that I enjoyed reading--parts of it were so painful that I found myself wincing as I read it. But, man, do those stories linger in the psyche. If you've read this page you have the basic gist of the story--what I'll add is that for me this little green accordian took on a life of its own. It started to seem like a little green gremlin, bringing bad luck and tragedy to the unlucky folk who possessed it. When I started to think about it that way, the idea that the energy with which it was "birthed" would linger to touch the lives of the people around it, all of the bad things that happened seemed to make a little more sense. Otherwise, what a pack of brawling, unlovable folk! I particularly enjoyed the quirky, parenthetical asides that followed a person's life, sometimes to the final moments. I think in a novel like this one, where you are following an inanimate object rather than a person, not giving some sort of follow-through about these people with whom you've spent some time getting to know would just be too frustrating. And they were satisfying in a strange way--wouldn't it be nice to get those little blips on your mental screen about those people who pass through your own life? (Paul S., former high school sweetheart, goes on to become an accountant, is moderately successful, but has a midlife crisis and joins the Church of the New Beginning, rises to power as a priest, is kicked out for having sex with the disciples, and spends his old age selling Super Blue-Green Algea products over the internet.)
Rating:
Summary: Not a bad read, but not as good as "The Shipping News."
Review: Annie Proulx is as master craftsman (craftsperson?) with words. Her sentences are magnificant and her dialog intricate and effective. This book, however, lacks a certain plot "glue" which it needs to hold it together. In "The Shipping News", one really comes to know the characters. This is not the case here. While each of the book's short stories is interesting, one finishes the book with the sense of leaving the table before dinner was complete
Rating:
Summary: a disappointment
Review: I must admit I agree with the less-favorable of the reviews listed here, even though I tried hard to like this book. The synopsis sounded interesting to me--one hundred years in the life of a hand-made accordion, passed on from generation to generation, ethnicity to ethnicity. A grand idea, mini-series material. My curiosity was piqued. I had to admire any author who had the guts to tackle such a project.Unfortunately, this was not a book that gripped me. It did not make me want to stay up late to read it or go out and recommend it to everyone I know; it did not give me any new and interesting insights into the human condition. Basically, it did not make me *feel* much. What I did like about the book was Proulx's command of the language. Every once in a while, I would read a sentence and think, "wow," which does make me optimistic enough to want to try Proulx's other novels. Throughout the book, Proulx finishes with a character by summarizing the rest of his or her life in one paranthetical paragraph. Each of the characters that are discarded in this way inevitably end up living a bizarre and unbelievably unlucky life and dying a strange death. I felt these were unnecessary and did not add anything to the book, except perhaps a feeling of triteness. These afterthoughts could have been written by anyone called upon to create a weird story; they didn't make me feel like I was getting to know a character any better. As a final note, I, too, felt that "Accordion Crimes" is not a novel but a series of short stories linked by a common element. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I don't feel that it was the intention
Rating:
Summary: Fine craft is not a substitute for honest emotion.
Review: After all the hype around this novelist's last effort, I decided to take a run at "Accordion Crimes". By the end of this exhausting novel (or more correctly, series of short stories connected by a plot device), I have sworn to myself never to read the follow-up to a successful novel.
First, as always, the good. Proulx is imaginative and writes well-crafted sentences, especially her dialogue. She certainly has no shortage of gumption for creating a book so sprawling in time, space and variety of characters. A for effort, A for technical expertise.
Now, the rest of the grade. F for emotion, F for excessive use of cliches, F for believability and depth of characterization, F for the silly parenthetical asides regarding character's "fate", F for the trite use of "mother tongue" words by ethnic characters, F for the tiresome lists that lie like roadkill throughout the book.
The truest sign of failure must surely be a reader's pity for an inanimate plot device. If I had been the poor little green accordion and known what a bunch of shallow, bland, and otherwise uninteresting series of persons were to press upon my keys, I would have jumped off the ship from Italy before it ever reached New Orleans.
Rating:
Summary: scary... not in the good way either
Review: Some gray, murky metaphors, adjectives, etc. happen in this book, but I found the WHOLE thing completely inaffective.
Let's just say it's the only book in my entire life that I returned to the bookstore AFTER I had read it, just because I didn't want it the book as a physical object in my house.
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