Rating: 
Summary: old-fashioned-I guess
Review: The selling point for me in purchasing DISOBEDIENCE was the young girl, who was a Civil War reenactor. I've always been Civil War nut, watched all of Ken Burns's PBS special, read COLD MOUNTAIN before it hit the best-seller list.
But, alas, Elvira, the reenactor, is not the focus of Hamilton's novel. There is a dramatic scene toward the end where Elvira learns it's not such a good idea to pretend to be one of the boys, but the real plot thread is Henry Shaw's "Inadvertent" reading of his mother's e-mail to her lover. She's a piano player in a group that plays antique music; her lover is a violin maker. Henry's father teaches history at the Chicago private school Henry and his sister attend. He's not too romantic. I guess that's supposed to be ironic, considering he's indirectly responsible for Elvira's obsession.
Henry, the little snoop, keeps on monitoring the course of his mother's affair.
The whole story is a flashback, written ten years after Henry read the letter, which gives Hamilton a reason, I suppose, to assume the empathetic tone toward the mother's affair that bothers me. Henry's had time to reflect; he now sees his mother as a human being with foibles and all that rot. Then there's the title: DISOBEDIENCE? I don't know, maybe she intended that to be double entendre, but I doubt it. INFIDELITY would be a better fit.
Rating: 
Summary: Hamilton's best so far
Review: I've read other Jane Hamilton books and enjoyed them to a point--this one, however, is a tremendously good read! It captured my attention immediately and it was one of those books you just can't put down.
Rating:
Summary: Obsessive son's account of his home life....
Review: Although this novel was brilliantly written, I found the subject matter to be boring and slightly unsettling. There are many incidents in the novel which lead me to ask the question, how much does the author, Ms. Hamilton, or any woman really, know about how a teenage male thinks & acts? How he deals with relationships with family, friends, and love interests. It seems far fetched througout the book. Also, the story that unfolds (from the main character, Henry's, viewpoint) is disturbing. His obsessive interest in his mother's love affair & the belief that he was his mother's husband in a former life left a bad taste in my mouth. This isn't the type of book I normally read & the only reason I finished it was due to the fact that I was interested in what would happen to Henry's sister Elvira. I wouldn't recommend this novel to my family or friends or anyone else.
Rating: 
Summary: Major failure
Review: What a disappointment. The idea is terrific -- a teenage boy discovers, via her e-mail file, that his mother is having an affair. Unfortunately -- flaw #1 -- the story is told by the boy ten years after the affair, so his reactions to the affair seem to be happening at a distance. Flaw #2 -- the major one -- is that the boy, Henry, is such a self-involved little jerk, even for a teenager, that I couldn't stand spending time with him and it was impossible to sympathize with him or care how he feels. I was trying to be patient with him and tell myself, well, it must be hard to know this about your mother, maybe he's not as bad as you think -- but an event involving his sister near the end of the book made it plain that he was just as self-absorbed as I thought he was. Flaw #3 -- it's never clear what effect, if any, the mother's affair had on her husband, her daughter, or even on Henry himself even though the entire book consists of his thinking about it! It almost felt as if the affair was another excuse for him to be more self-absorbed. I think it might have been a better book if told from the point of view of Henry at 17, rather than 10 years later. Guess I'll have to read some other book by Jane Hamilton to find out what the fuss is about.
Rating: 
Summary: A enjoyable, yet unsatisfying book
Review: I am a Jane Hamilton fan, based on her first two books which were top notched. Disobedience was fun to read. I found myself laughing out loud. There was so much to like about the book but the problem was that Henry's just didn't ring true. Some have said he sounded like a middle aged woman; e.g., Jane Hamilton herself, and I must agree. This is a book that should have been written in the third person. One wonders why the author's editor did not tell her this. Today's publishers rush any book to press that is guarenteed to sell based on the author's previsous reputation. Look at 'Tis, the followup to Angelia's Ashes, for a good example. With some advice from the editor, 'Tis could have been a good book, instead it was a horrid book. And yet, I did enjoy "Disobedience" while at the same time having regrets and experiencing sadness for an excellent idea that did not bear satisfying fruit. I hope Jane Hamilton gives up on writing novels with males speaking in the first person. Her third book suffered from the same flaw.
Rating:
Summary: Promising but didn't quite deliver
Review: Jane Hamilton has been compared with other female novelists like Anne Tyler and Jane Smiley who write in the same vein and specialize in overblown domestic dramas. "Disobedience" falls neatly into this category but it's family drama writ small. The premise for the novel appears promising. Henry, teenage son of Kevin and Elizabeth Shaw and brother of tomboy younger sister Elvira, stumbles upon his mother's adultery with fellow musician, Richard Polloco, whilst accidentally reading her emails one day. He recoils and spends the rest of the novel stewing in helpless horror at his mother's betrayal. He's seized by inaction not because he's a wimp - though there are moments you feel like giving him a good shake - but because he's half child, half grownup and cannot quite make emotional sense or carry the lonely burden of his awful discovery. His mental distress and confusion is evidenced throughout by the multiple identities he has created for his mother - she is referred to often in the same paragraph if not the same sentence as Elizabeth, Mrs Shaw, or Liza (her email nickname). He even imagines she was his warring spouse in his former life. While it's hard to quarrel with the smooth, intimate prose flowing from Hamilton's expert pen, "Disobedience" falters on its poor characterization and inattention to plot details which strain credibility. The latter first. It's hard to imagine Elizabeth not taking basic precautions with her email access when she is carrying on this torrid online affair with Richard she's trying to keep secret ? A more serious criticism is Hamilton's less than convincing conceptualization of the Henry character. She never quite got into his head. His response just seems odd for a teenage boy. Elizabeth, I found unsympathetic and irritating. Hamilton is rather more successful with Kevin. He's the cerebral, head in the clouds type who is simultaneously a godsent parent to Elvira as well as the emotionally distant if not spaced out husband who has driven his wife up the wall and into the arms of Richard. We're ambivalent about him but that's fine. However, "Disobedience" is saved from total failure by Elvira, the eccentric tomboy sister of uncertain sexual persuasion who is obsessed with the reenactment of the Civil War, but also the novel's one character you really care about. She's a lively invention who lights up the pages and brings a big smile to my face whenever she appears. Hamilton would have had a more successful novel in her hands had she made Elvira the subject of her novel. Maybe she should, as a sequel to this. "Disobedience" begins promisingly, then finds itself stuck in a groove for nearly two thirds of its length, but ends with the aftermath of a dramatic episode that leaves you with the funny feeling that dysfunctionality still lurks beneath the surface and could rear its ugly ahead should Hamilton decide to write her next instalment on the Shaws. My recommendation is, "forget about Henry, concentrate on Elvira, you've got a heroine in her".
Rating:
Summary: It irked me
Review: Disobedience has some great elements to it, but one aspect really prevented me from enjoying it: Henry Shaw, the main character and narrator, is NOT a 17 year old boy-- at least he isn't believable as a 17 year old boy. Henry is characterized as a normal kid, but Hamilton puts an EXCESS of matured thought processes into the boy. His knowledge, his personality traits, the way he talks, even, they all led me to believe that Jane Hamilton was the novel's central character. If Henry Shaw was instead a well read, female grad student, I would praise this novel to the heavens. This not being the case, however, I generously give it 3 stars.
Rating: 
Summary: Major Disappointment
Review: I don't know what I was expecting from this book but it just failed to click with me. I read the whole book but I couldn't wait to finish it just to be done with it. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen and I found myself skipping over paragraphs that were, frankly boring. I was very distracted by the way the book kept teetering back and forth; for example, when Henry introduced the topic of the first email, he mentioned it, digressed for awhile, then went back to it. He did this more than once. I also thought Henry's preoccupation with his mother to be a little sick and abnormal. I just couldn't buy the idea of a 17 year old boy being so totally wrapped up in his mother's affair and the lives of his family. Even his relationships with other people seemed to be overly entwined with what was going on at home. I thought most teenagers could care less what their parents were doing. And what about Beth taking Elvira and Henry to meet her lover, Polloco? Oh please! That was just so ridiculous! Oddly, the only character that was at all of interest to me was that of Elvira, and only because she was so unbelievable. I almost would have liked to have read a novel or short story with her as the protoganist instead.
Rating:
Summary: A Book Club Read If There Ever Was One
Review: Disobedience is the type of book for which Book Clubs were created -- there's a universally interesting story, protagonists who could be any one of us, a lot of plotting possibilities and it's appealing to readers who consider themselves a little more discriminating in their tastes for fiction. There's nothing wrong with any of those criteria, it's just that lumped together, you run the risk of achieving the literary equivalent of someone wearing too much perfume in a closed elevator. Disobedience is more like getting on that elevator shortly after the offender has left the scene -- something stinks, but you don't know who to blame.
Still, I liked this book and think Hamilton is a fine writer, one who has a real feel for the pulse of life in the midwest, particularly Wisconsin. I don't think she's as compellingly authentic as Kent Haruf and his Holt, Colorado, stories, but she's convincing nonetheless. As a narrator, Henry Shaw does a good job of reacting as a seventeen year old to learning that his mother is having an affair. It's hard to believe I'd have handled it differently. I struggled a little with the story being told by Henry as an adult, but it didn't change the core story -- how a family exists. I think the infidelity plot is only one way the tale of family dynamics can be adequately illustrated. It's just a sexy way to put family life under the magnifying glass to peel away the lies, deceptions, individuals and concessions that are made in every family every day. Disobedience's Civil War sub-plot works well as a symbol of the uncivil fighting within the family, even when, by all rights, things should be OK. Hamilton's characters are believable (except for possibly the father/husband, who, for all his intelligence, is either blind or ambivalent, neither of which I necessarily buy) and the dialog convincing. Overall, I found Disobedience neither earth-shattering nor offensive. I smelled a little something unpleasant, but got out of the story in plenty of time to enjoy it for being exactly what I imagine Hamilton hoped it would be -- a slightly uncomfortable read about those relations we call our families.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing Discourse
Review: I've enjoyed Jane Hamilton's previous books 'The Book of Ruth' and 'A Map of the World' for their strong, believable characters and descriptive narration. She is an excellent writer, and one of my favorite contemporary authors. However...'Disobedience' was more of a Disappointment for me. The story begins when 17-year old Henry, the family computer expert, logs onto his mother's e-mail account and discovers that she's having an affair. An adult Henry narrates several years later, recounting family life during the year of the affair. This narrative just didn't ring true for me. It read more like a 40 year old woman's version of a 17-year old boy. What male, 17 or otherwise, uses terms like 'feminine rage'? The characters were one-dimensional, the story rambled, and the 'climactic ending' was flat.
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