Rating: 
Summary: Title couldn't have been more fitting
Review: "Love Among the Ruins" is a story set in the late 1960's centered around two troubled families who live in Minnesota. In the beginning, William Lowry (17) writes a letter to Emily Byrne (16) who he's seen around and would like to get to know better. The first part of the novel sets the stage for their relationship, as they become involved. Though they're very much in love, Bill and Emily feel as if they cannot really be together with heavy issues staring them in the face such as the Vietnam draft. In the end of the first part, they decide to run away and live off the land up north. The second portion of the novel is a look into the lives of the kids' parents as they react to their children leaving home. Then the third part takes the reader to the new life that Emily and Bill have created for themselves on an island paradise where they can be together and be "free." But, it comes with consequence. Now that they have everything they thought they wanted, Emily in particular begins to reflect back on what they've given up.
Rating:
Summary: Started out good...
Review: I felt like this book started out good but then the two young "lovers" just run off together and have sex all the time. That's pretty much it. It lacked a good story line. It had a story line...just not a good one.
Rating:
Summary: Started out good...
Review: I felt like this book started out good but then the two young "lovers" just run off together and have sex all the time. That's pretty much it. It lacked a good story line. It had a story line...just not a good one.
Rating:
Summary: Started out good...
Review: I felt like this book started out good but then the two young "lovers" just run off together and have sex all the time. That's pretty much it. It lacked a good story line. It had a story line...just not a good one.
Rating: 
Summary: Sorely disappointed
Review: In part, my rating of this book is so low due to my great disappointment in a book that a local newspaper (Seattle PI) called a 'break-out book', meaning a book that would establish Mr. Clark as above mid-list. I've read 'In the deep midwinter' and thought it was a fine first book, a bit dull really, but well written. This book is not only dull, but of highly debatable craft. While he does manage to salvage an ending, it is only through authorial trickery, which I am not a fan of in novels. My biggest problems was the use of an omniscient narrator to *tell* us all about the characters, instead of our learning the characters through their actions/reactions to events. Beyond that, the characters are dull, mundane people, with dull, mundane problems. I'm not looking for Rambo in my writing, but in both the author's books, they start with "normal" characters, seem to find little interesting to say about them, invent some trouble that doesn't really fit the story well (the note in the furnace of 'deep midwinter', or William deciding to go to Canada when that seemed too great a step for such a directionless character to take) and then either going nowhere with it (deep midwinter) or having to invent a way out of it (love among the ruins). This is coming out a bit harsher than I mean it to. This author has so much more promise than 99% of the writers: the voice in his books is beautiful, the setting perfect. I *want* so much to enjoy his books because they feel so close to being masterpieces. Yet, for whatever reason (pressure to go beyond mid-list?) he is not be hitting the mark.
Rating: 
Summary: i love young love
Review: it really took me to a kind of place where i wish i spent my teens. it was hard not to feel good through even the worst of times.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful Work -- Again
Review: Robert Clark has become one of my two or three favorite contemporary American writers. I loved "In Deep Midwinter" -- having grown up in Minnesota and having experienced the environment and the people he described in that tale. And now this -- growing up and wising up -- in Minnesota in the late 1960s. Clark is a careful and thoughtful writer and his ruminations on our times, on growing old, on the whims and fancies of fate and history, of our illusions of control and of the afflictions of melancholy and the glories of love -- love of a boy for a girl, a man for a woman, a mother and father for children -- is incomparable among other writers today. I am always sad to come to the end of his books -- both because they ring so true in the end in a sad (but true) way and beause I want the story to go on and on and on. Bravo Mr. Clark. Please give us more.
Rating:
Summary: extraordinary work
Review: Robert Clark's characters are so authentically identifiable that, upon reading his novels, you sometimes have the haunting feeling that he somehow knows you, too -- and knows exactly how to reach you. His portrayals of his fellow humans, so dignified by precise, loving language, make you feel honored to be included. (And a little grateful, too: He has a gift for compassion and forgiveness.) I neither know Clark, nor am in the habit of writing reviews unless I'm especially moved. This is such a special case: an author who conveys universes with a handful of sweetly drawn individuals.
Rating:
Summary: Tragic and beautiful
Review: This book is easy to read, and not-so-easy to read at the same time. It's easy to read because the characters are so real, and there are just two major (intertwined) story lines. The reader is drawn in to the story through the narrative and attention to detail. It's difficult to read because Mr. Clark seems to display an uncanny knack for getting in the mind of 16-17 year olds - he accurately portrays the stage of life without becoming histrionic (like many other writers do). Be warned: some of the thoughts and feelings described may hit close to the bone. If you like literature that will have you examining your own feelings long after reading the final page, read this book.
Rating:
Summary: i love young love
Review: This novel is rather astonishing, achingly beautiful in its evocation of the intensities and spiritual mandates of young love. And separating the narrative of the two teen lovers, William and Emily (and their need to escape the late-sixties nation collapsing around them) is a brilliant exploration also of adult longing and transgression, of parental obligations and limitations. Throughout his narrative Clark includes piercing assertions of emotional and spiritual clarity--fearless hypotheses of how life feels and how love works--the storyteller himself demonstrating the seriousness of his purpose and the unimpeachable importance of new love, and our ways of trying--often desperately--to preserve it. I find I really can't, with my overblown language here, do justice to the subtle, haunting experience of this novel. Suffice it to say I think the book deserves panoramic attention and acclaim. Its attentions are commanding and sensitive, its connectivities never glib or too babyboomer-sentimental. It will leave you shaken but safe, somehow better off and, though perhaps this is particular to my case, feeling inevitably older.
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