A Lover's Almanac

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely wonderful
Review: It is shocking to come across a writer so wonderful and yet so unknown to most readers. This is surely one of the great books of the past 25 years. There are times, when attempting to describe a book, that words absolutely fail in relaying the complex beauty of the work. The prose is perfect, inventive, expansive, brilliant. It restores a sense of time to our contemporary age that so likes to imagine itself cut adrift. If Howard had a million readers, the world would be a better place.

Rating:
Summary: A novel that requires time and thought
Review: Maureen Howard's "A Lover's Almanac" is not an easy, pre-packaged, "pop-culture" read. Although the base of this story is a simple love story: boy loves girl, boy gets drunk and proposes marriage, girl gets [angry] and dumps boyfriend, and finally they reunite. This, however, is not what is important about Howards narrative. Whats amazing here is the claims she makes about the characters ties to history -- the importance of history in allowing live as they should. If you're a reader who demands an author of high intellect and wit Maureen Howard is for you. Hopefully, she will one day gain the recognition she deserves

Rating:
Summary: Fancy digressions but no core
Review: The book promises to be right up my alley. It's about lost love, it's set among New York artsy Yuppies, and its narrative is a formal experiment. A broken couple's story, beginning the morning of the new millenium, moves freely in time and point of view, broken by a true almanac of famous dates, to chart as well a parallel love of the man's grandfather regained after decades. Only we never get any clearer sense of what drove any of them together in the first place, apart, or back together. The prose is blandly elegaic, and the digressions, which could have been copied verbatim from an encyclopedia, never convinced me that the events are somehow paradigmatic of history or, conversely, that the historical anecdotes and Y2K shed any light on the couple. So ambitious but forced and numbing.