The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue

Rating:
Summary: Please kill me
Review: After repeatedly falling asleep trying to read this book, I have come to the conclusion this is some sort of communist device used to force college students to commit suicide from boredom. If you have to read this book drop the class. It's like reading grass, and moves at the same pace. Dull is to exciting of a word for this book. The word that best describes this book is dgtreed. What does it mean? I don't know! I'm still trying to find meaning!! But it's pointless!!

Rating:
Summary: I Bought it for Ireland, but read it for Women
Review: I bought this book preparatory to a month in Ireland, as a mental/political exercise (aware of former banning). I couldn't put it down, and got three hours or less sleep for three nights in a row. I foisted it on my mom with warnings not to begin it on a weeknight, she got hooked on a Tuesday and went downhill too. We talked for days about how tightly written it was, how clean, spare, descriptive, full of foreshadowing, and painful to any woman who knows what it is to be centally disappointed by a man. Yet the book never whines, it never pushes itself sobbing on your shoulder. It sits in dignity with sadness.

Very quietly and methodically tragic, in the Irish way that says you do not whine about tragedy, you do not make fuss of it, you just simply pray a bit and go on. What makes the book so very valuable and unusual is that it applies the Irish knack for storytelling and forthright 'un-tragic' tragedy to women's lives and women's stories. It is both an Irish book full of water and woodsmoke, and a women's book in all its painful honesty and revelatory grace.

Please read.

Rating:
Summary: breath of fresh air
Review: i heard an interview with edna o'brien on npr's FRESH AIR and was impressed with her style. i read the trilogy because of the interview, not because of the Ireland component. this book is poignant, funny, sincere, a page-turner, and honest. i keep looking at the copyright date and not believing that it was written years ago. this book is a definite breath of fresh air!