Rating: 
Summary: Best tomboy book
Review: This book is splendid, 4+ out of 5 stars only because it sags a little bit in the middle. Ms Hamilton's writing about a mother's secret affair and a sister's fanatical tomboy obsessions from the point of view of a seventeen-year old boy is nothing short of brilliant, from a writing and a characterization standpoint. Many things stand out, a few are the rendering of a talented woman with a more than good and loving husband yet she still needs something more, plus the punishing complexity of choices it put before her; even more I liked Elvira, the girl-boy-child who forges ahead with her obsessive interests and spurns girlishness, leaps headlong into being a boy among men and suffers acutely from their reaction when they learn the truth, and then recovers with a leap upward in self-understanding. I stand in awe of Ms Hamilton's abilities.
Rating: 
Summary: A road to nowhere
Review: The book's theme was deeply personal for me, the prose engaging, almost like easedropping. The narrator's writing, thought provoking and poetic, did not ring true. The young man spoke like a middle-aged woman, not a man deeply affected by his mother's affair. I found the book engrossing and could not put it down, yet all the while I wanted it to be longer. Let me hear more of Kevin's voice, I would think. Act like a 17 year old, Henry! Do something impulsive, demand that your mother do something, anything, to make this story have a reason to be told. I have read 2 other Jane Hamilton books and I will continue to read more, but it's as if she was on a deadline and decided to finish the book almost before it began.
Rating:
Summary: E-mail, Oedipus and the Civil War (re-enacted)
Review: This was a fun story - we learn from the narrator son Henry about his quirky but loveable family. The basis for the story is Henry's obsession with his oedipal relationship with his mother when he discovers from her e-mail that she is having an affair. This story would wear thin under the pen of any less a writer than Jane Hamilton. But the other members of the Shaw family are so entertaining that I didn't mind Henry's inability to get a life. I read this one straight through.
Rating: 
Summary: boring boring boring
Review: less than one star, actually. Could not even manage to get to page 100 - which is my minimum. I refuse to waste time reading boring drivel when there are so many good books to be discovered and so little time to read them. I bought this hoping for another 'map of the world.' i probably should have known better since i didn't finish her last book either. i agree with a previous reviewer about the narrator's voice sounding inauthenthic. the civil war daughter was a silly and boring distraction. the father - less than one dimensional. nothing ever happened. there was no there, there! Though I LOVED a map of the world, it was clearly an anomoly in hamilton's body of work. will not bother with her again.
Rating: 
Summary: Another Terrific Achievement for Hamilton
Review: I was not dissapointed by Disobedience. It was a terrific book, one that I couldn't put down. I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: This was an absolutely terrific book. I just loved it. There were multiple themes played out by a host of great characters, every one of them interesting and likable. The overriding theme was about sons and mothers, but there surely were things going on that were about brother and sister, husband and wife, among others. The writing, too, was spectacular. The main character was a young man, perhaps 30, who was looking back on his family's life the year he was 17. The voice of the 17-year-old was dead-on, and he spoke with teenage humor and irony in appropriate doses. There were also some gems that were not part of the dialogue, but the observations of situations and characters that expressed the complexity of relationships with poetic language. I suspect that this book will remain with me for a long time to come and that I will recommend it regularly.
Rating:
Summary: never quite fulfilled the story's potential
Review: The book opens with the narrator accidentally opening his mother's email account and discovering that she has just begun having an affair. And so the stage is set for a story about what happens in a family when one person has a secret and another person not only knows the secret but knows all the details of how the affair progresses (because he continues to read all the back and forth, almost daily, emails between his mother and her lover, plus the mother's emails confiding to her best friend). This story, for all its potential, is uninteresting and at times even dreary reading.The book is written in the first person, narrated by the son Henry who at the time was 17. From the start I felt that the voice didn't sound quite right. A few pages into the book the reader learns that the story is being told "less than a decade later", which would make Henry in his mid-twenties. This made the voice a little more believable, but I still had trouble with it, I had the constant nagging sense that his writing style and observations just did not ring true. Then I wondered if in the end there would be a reason for the story being told ten years later, would we learn how these events affected Henry as an adult, or would it turn out that his printing of the emails would trigger some event years later? There is so much that could have happened in this book, so much that I kept expecting to happen, but there just isn't enough here in the way of plot, and very little dialogue. Yes, there is some dialogue, but more often conversations are described. Much in the book is described, observed, thought about. It has a slow pace. In spite of all this, I started out enjoying this book and for the first 100 pages or so I had a hard time putting it down. The writing is beautifully crafted without getting bogged down and I liked the way the narrator saw the family's life, even though I never bought the idea that the narrator was a 17 year old boy or even a 27 year old man. When talking about the family moving from rural Vermont to Chicago he says "Outside we would be in danger from both the careless ways of the rich and the careless ways of the poor." And "I was taken from Vermont before I could think to want to leave it myself, and so for me Wellington is the ideal, my old backyard there my deepest sense of home." It's lines like these that kept me turning the pages, up to a point. But then I got tired of not knowing who these people were. The father is a cheerful near-saint and not much more complex than that. The sister is passionate about Civil War reenactment. A good part of the book deals with that, but her character is not developed beyond that one aspect. And not enough happens in this book, although I kept thinking something would happen soon. Henry considers deleting some of the emails from his mother's lover before she can read them, or better yet, replying to the emails himself, posing as his mother. Will he do that? Will that lead to something else happening? His mother talks openly to the family about her lover, a fellow musician she has just met. She wants everyone to think this is just another friend, she wants to not appear secretive, but talking about him is risky. Will this lead to something? The mother goes to a psychic for some relief from her inner conflict and the son reads about it in an email and visits the same psychic. Will this lead to something? Curiosity and good writing kept me reading the book but in the end I was disappointed. There were so many possiblities in this story, but none of them, for me, was realized. There was a weekend when Henry was distracted and unable to concentrate. He was reading a novel by a contemporary author whose name he has now forgotten. He says "A book I read from beginning to end that weekend without registering much action or dialogue." Maybe that line has to do with his lack of concentration. Or maybe it has to do with the book itself. That pretty much sums up my feelings towards this book. I read it, but I didn't register much action or dialogue.
Rating:
Summary: The First Book I haven't Finished Since The Golden Notebook
Review: Did Jane Hamilton (one of my all-time favorite authors) really write this book?? I agree with a previous review: "Who cares?" I thought the story line was potentially interesting, but really bought the book based on Jane Hamilton's name. I am throwing in the towel after 150 boring pages...anxious to get on with the rest of my summer reading list and, hopefully, something with a little more reason to read.
Rating:
Summary: a mixed bag
Review: This is my first Hamilton book and I found it absorbing enough to want to reach the end. The writing is very good in places, but I have to admit that the reviewer below hit the nail on the head regarding the book's fatal flaw -- Henry never sounds like the "real" narrator -- I kept feeling that I was reading Hamilton's voice channeled through a 20 something male. I found Kevin, the father, to be the most interesting character of the novel. In his own quiet way (nothing like the flamboyant Elvira or the restless mother), he keeps the family together and waits for his wife to return to him. He was the only character I felt for -- the others are a remarkably unsympathetic lot. I think if Hamilton hadn't been famous before this novel, no one would have been very interested in it. I was impressed in parts, but overall it's pretty mediocre.
Rating:
Summary: Obsessiveness profiled
Review: This book took a little while to draw me in--longer than the other Hamiltons I've read--but I think it will also stay with me far longer than the others. Aside from the fact that it draws inspiration from one of my favorite books, Tony Horwitz's _Confederates in the Attic_, _Disobedience_ appeals to me mainly for the characters' obsessive need for revisiting and reviewing, even if the things/people to which they constantly return are the things that hurt them most. Beth's affair with Polloco is clearly painful as well as joyous, but she just can't resist it. Henry's obsession with this affair simply won't go away, even as he's forced to secrecy (and that makes it all the more painful--like having a sore in your mouth that you can't help poking at). It would be interesting to consider how Elvira, in later years, would "revisit" her reenacting days, which would clearly be both joyous and painful in recollection. Even Kevin, as a revisionist historian, has this sort of obsession, although he seems less obsessive than the rest of his family (I think this both dooms him and saves him, paradoxically). As I'm an obsessive personality and revisionist myself, this theme (especially as it was expressed in Henry's voice, overall) was naturally compelling. I was also struck by the anger in this book--despite Henry's sense of humor, which serves as a shield and a disguise, he is probably the angriest protagonist I've seen since Dominick Birdsey in Wally Lamb's _I Know This Much Is True_. Since I'm interested in how writers sustain a voice of anger, this book was, yet again, a joy. A book club buddy of mine called this "the most immoral book I've ever read." Guess I have fewer issues with morality, and more interest in what really makes people tick, than she does. I applaud Hamilton for refusing to shy away from that reality.
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