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Summary: Wonderful stories by a wonderful writer
Review: Pam Houston's "Walzing the Cat" is one of the best books I've read recently, interconnecting stories full of lyrical writing, jolt-you-to-attention insights, and luminous images. The titular story is perfect in every way, an examination of family, death and the horror of conditional love. Another gem is "The Whole Weight of Me" when our heroine jumps into illuminated water and tells us "When I opened by eyes under the surface, I felt like I was swimming in the stars."Yes, the character is searching for love, but she is a thinking woman's heroine -- an artist, philosopher, and wounded but tough bird waiting to take flight. In the end, it's only fair that that flight is solo. A wonderful book... turned me into a Pam Houston fan.
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Summary: With liberating analogies, Pam Houston takes you places
Review: Pam Houston's gift for prose with analogies is not the only adventure you'll find in her books. Her experience on the Amazon river is ours. Her family are people we know well, dysfunctional - yes, curious - yes, family - yes! She makes familiar all these fascinating places and characters. Enriching our experience with her richness in prose, Pam Houston is a must read!
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Summary: Tales of a lost soul.
Review: Reading this book was like spending time listening to the girls in my dorm talk about their endless, repetitive breakups, except that the narrator is middle-aged, not nineteen. After a while I started to wonder if all these men are really such jerks or is there something fundamentally wrong with the narrator's personality? I mean, there must be a reason why every single one of them leaves. Maybe it's best that Lucy's alone at the end. Maybe she's not meant to share her life with anyone at all.
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Summary: comment
Review: Thank you for your review of "one weak to freedom"
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Summary: An expertly crafted book from a skilled and exciting writer.
Review: The writer of Cowboys Are My Weakness has advanced and improved upon her original success, pushing her new stories with daring prose and complex plots, revealing a new artistic confidence and an even more refined knack for smart dialogue and self-reflection. There are few contemporary artists who can depict with more insight and sensitivity a woman's perspective on landscape (whether it be the Bay Area, the Amazon or a small Colorado mining town), relationships (with both men and women), and identity. Houston explores some familiar and new terrain in Waltzing the Cat. There is, for certain, what you might expect: outdoor adventures of a strong woman in the American West, smart and revealing depictions of her relationships with various men. But she also explores some exciting new terrain, both physical--most significantly, a place in the world to call home--and psychological, in the form of deft and brave visits to a darker past, the story that lurks behind all other stories. The opening chapter, "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had," as well as "Three Lessons in Amazonian Biology" and the title story, are among the best I've read in years, and Houston interconnects them all in fascinating ways, creating less a book of short stories than a novel in stories, a novel which culminates in a lovely and disturbing epilogue that provides not only an emotional coda to the book but the formula for its decoding. I was impressed and delighted with Waltzing the Cat, aware as I read that I was in the hands of a gifted and innovative writer.
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Summary: This book is a reminder to all of us.
Review: There are some things in life that come around at the right moment. Call it fate or luck, this book is one of those things. This is the first Pam Houston book that I've read, so I don't have "Cowboys..." to compare against. Held on it's own merits, I found "Waltzing..." to be a strong yet convincing collection of stories. Lucy O'Roarke is the imperfect heroine that reminds us that failure IS an option (over and over again), but learning from these many life experiences is the ultimate goal. Thanks, I needed that.
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Summary: This book is a reminder to all of us.
Review: There are some things in life that come around at the right moment. Call it fate or luck, this book is one of those things. This is the first Pam Houston book that I've read, so I don't have "Cowboys..." to compare against. Held on it's own merits, I found "Waltzing..." to be a strong yet convincing collection of stories. Lucy O'Roarke is the imperfect heroine that reminds us that failure IS an option (over and over again), but learning from these many life experiences is the ultimate goal. Thanks, I needed that.
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Summary: Self-indulgent drivel
Review: Why do we need one more collection of stories narrated by a "heroine" from a dysfunctional background with so little self-esteem that she allows herself to be abused or treated badly by virtually every person in her life while simultaneously droning about her terror of growing old alone? Lucy's sense of worthlessness is appalling. Enough already.
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Summary: Get Over It
Review: Why doesn't she find a new subject? This book is such a disappointment--the fine sense of story is gone, replaced with self- help and psychobabble masquerading as characters. A HUGE disappointment.
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