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Summary: Anne Tyler's Quirky Families Always Entertain
Review: Anne Tyler creates the most delightful dysfunctional families. There's nothing like reading an Anne Tyler book to make you feel better about your own quirky, misguided, sometimes insane family. It's interesting that she sets her stories in Baltimore, a city much like her characters. But I just have one question about this novel. What was so wrong with the old boyfriend? I thought he got dismissed rather abruptly, and I couldn't help but feel sorry for him.
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Summary: "a review of what it was like to be alive"
Review: Back When We Were Grownups is a wonderful book, as good as Tyler's Breathing Lessons, which won a Pulitzer Prize! As always, her characters are real people. They are foolish, insecure, thin-skinned, fearful of what life throws their way...and sometimes wonderfully wise and always truly human. Poppy's speech on his 100th birthday, a speech generally ignored by most of the attendees at his party, is the answer to the question, What is the secret of life?! Tyler has the three qualities I prize most in my favorite authors: the ability to see what makes people tick, an eye for the perfect revealing detail, and a grand sense of humor. As always, I eagerly await Tyler's next book!
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Summary: Older Women need stories,too
Review: This story is insightful, looking into the mind of a woman who's not just a beautiful, capable savvy person who's also YOUNG (most heroines seem to be under 30), but who's lived and won life's battles and has scars. Women (and men too, I suspect) feel inside just the same at 50 or 60 as they did at 20.
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Summary: Truth be Told
Review: I hadn't read Anne Tyler in quite some time, but when I did, I ached for what I had been missing. This is a novel that makes one pensive and appreciative of the gifts we are given, however capriciously, by fate. Read this book. It lends perspective on our desires and priorities.
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Summary: Engaging story of a woman attempting to understand her life.
Review: Throughout this novel, I got the impression that the protagonist, Rebecca, had just kind of fallen into the various circumstances in her life. Anne Tyler has a way of allowing readers to tumble around among the jumbled thoughts of her characters and this was no exception.Without thinking or saying it outright "What if...", Rebecca fumbles her way back to an old boyfriend, as if to pick up where she left off over 30 years ago when she dumped him for another man. Disappointment after awkward disappointment, the reader knows before Rebecca that you can't go back. So many times I've gone through what Rebecca goes through in this story...wondering what life would have been if things had been different. She is under the mistaken impression that her life to this point has been someone elses or a mistake. Ms. Tyler subtly guides Rebecca - and the reader - to the inevitable conclusion. While this is nicely done - we truly feel some of the angst, tension, annoyance and bewilderment that Rebecca goes through - it does, at times, seem to ramble along with no apparent direction. I'd have preferred to give this 3 1/2 stars, rather than 3. It's a decent read, but not the quality of some of her previous books.
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Summary: Someone has to be in the minority
Review: I found this book boring, convoluted, and very easy to put down. The book did not keep my interest, and I only finished it, because I finish all books. I am in the correct age group, but seem to not like the type of self-absorbed characters in this book. The make-up of the family is changing and this book does not fit in with my life, or the lives of the people and families in my life.
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Summary: Best of the 15!
Review: I've read all 15 of Tyler's books and this one is by far the best. Maybe it's because I am 53 years old like Beck and now that my children are out on their own I wonder if this is the person I thought I'd become. This was the most believable of all of her writings and I can hardly wait for more!
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Summary: Back when we were grownups
Review: Tyler's current book is excellent. Her hapless characters are meticulously drawn, each with his/her peculiar speech patterns, and eccenric behavior. We all have a Poppy in our lives, a sweetly-selfish centenarian, who informs everyone what life is all about. I feel that I know Beck, the introspective "cheerleader" who is, as she calls herself "superfluous" in the minds of her fractious family. Rarely recognized, except for Zeb, for her selfless contributions to the Davitch family, she enchants the reader, as so many of Tyler's late middle aged women do with her thoughtful preoccupation with the meaning of life.
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Summary: Isn't it Amazing how life turned out?
Review: Fearing of turning into a wrong person is a sad and truthful self confession. 53 years old Rebecca is a widow since she was 26 years old.One fine day,she suddenly began to doubt the way her life turned out.She felt driving further and further away from what she intended to be.. Her lack of self-believe and doubts in the what-ifs of life is the main backbone of this Anne Tyler lastest novel. Rebecca is lonely,virtuous,caring woman with a complex family tree consists of 4 daughters,7 grand children and numerous in-laws,ex-,step- . It's not easy to keep track and topped up with several unique names. The best parts about "Back When We Were Grownups" are the opening lines, the flashbacks of Rebecca, the picnic,her final realisation about how lucky and blissful she really is and the funny and many witty moments of this book and not forgetting the ending with the home video fully justify the case and a happy ending. Once again Anne came up with a superb business idea with "The Open Arms". Unique and like "Rent-A-Back" from "Patchwork Planet" totally brilliant and cool businsess sense. There are several quirky and funny moments too esp. Beck's meeting with her childhood sweetheart,Will. Her regrets not paying half the dinner check and pouring out her woes to a old lover,etc... Poppy and his birthday speech is great. I quote "There is no true life...your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be." Through these words sumed up the moral of the story. This book do have several dwelling parts but all in all it's a great novel and not forgetting it'll make a great mother's day gift or a great birthday gift too.
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Summary: Did you miss it?
Review: Anne Tyler goes back to an earlier style, in her work 'Back When We were Grownups.' Her main character's moment of epiphany is so fleeting, it is easily overlooked. The motiviating factor in this, as in so many of Tyler's works, is that voyage of self-realization. The key to Anne's work is Joyousness; in the writing, as well as in the main character. Well worth reading, one more time.
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