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Women's Fiction

Crooked Little Heart : A Novel

Crooked Little Heart : A Novel

List Price: $13.95
Your Price: $10.46
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Review of Crooked Little Heart
Review: Rosie is a 12 year old girl that loves to play tennis with her friend Simon, which is good because they happen to be quite good at it. As the book moves on they start progressing in their skill. The book talks about the things that teenagers go through when they are younger and start to get older. Such as liking for the other sex, having sex with someone but not having a relationship afterwards, dealing with pregnancy and problems you go through with your parents. This books goes into depth about they way teenagers are and how they act, and how they deal with different kinds of problems and people.

I would rate this book as a 5. It was written well but the language was a little hard to understand at times. And even through I could relate to it, but some parts of it were just really boring. And sure I feel bad for Simon but that really isn't a way to keep you into the book, unless it was a book about pregnancy. At the beginning I thought it was going to be an ok book, but not really something that I wanted to read. So I wasn't really motivated at all. It wasn't really hard to read as much as it was boring to read. I couldn't really sit still when I was reading it. I had to be playing with a pencil or something when had too read it. The vocabulary was a little bit of a challenge in some places, but not as much as other books I have read in the past. Some difficulties that someone might have reading this book would be that if you were a person like me and thought it was really boring, if you didn't like hearing about all the girly things that went on in the book, if you have a hard time reading about family problems, like marriages, then this might not be the book for you. If you have any of those difficulties then you might not want to read it because it's not really worth reading if your not going to enjoy it. The way I cam into contact with reading this book was when my class has book club and so I was chosen to read this book, but I did not pick it myself. Intact it was one that I did not want to read. I think that females would enjoy this book more that males would, unless you like to read these types of books. But I defiantly think that females would like reading this book more than males would.

Here is a quote that shows the way Anne Lamott writes in this book, "With Renee serving, a long tense rally ensued. Rosie hit another fantastic drop shot that Renee somehow go to one split second before it bounced again, and she continued up to the net. Rosie lobbed it over head, and Renee got to the lob and lobbed it back, but her shot landed an inch or so past the baseline. 'Yes,' said James. 'All right.' Rosie stopped the ball, caught it, took a long deep breath. Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief" (page 191 paragraph 7) I chose this paragraph because it show what Anne Lamott writes like. It also shows that her style is using well-suited vocabulary in just the right places. I know that she is a good writer but I guess I just don't like tennis, there for I don't like the book.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Depiction of real teenage girl
Review: The novel, Crooked Little Heart, by Anne Lamott, revolves around a main character named Rosie who is a teenager. Rosie lives with her mother, who is a recovering alcoholic and her stepfather. She has a best friend named Simone who is her exact opposite and together, they play tennis and they live in the Bay Area. Rosie also deals with a man named Luther who has an obsession for her. I really enjoyed reading this book. On a scale of one to ten, I would give it a nine. I liked this book because the author narrated with different characters so that the reader got a different perspective on each obstacle and event. Right away I was into the book, but towards the middle I lost interest for about ten pages. For a while the author began to discuss things that seemed to have absolutely no relevance to the current story line. The novel was a medium challenge for me. I found the vocabulary to be rather adult and sometimes the author made references to things that I didn't know about. Overall, most people my age could handle this easily without much trouble and it wasn't too hard or old for me. Something that people might have difficultiy with in this book were the issues it dealt with regarding Rosie's mother alcoholism or her emotional problems. To get through these difficulties they could read it with someone so that they could discuss the confusion that they had with reading it, and talk about things that bothered them.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: lick
Review: this is a confection-lover's delight for all TRUE and novice annie lamott fans. a great read, fascinating characters, the usual wonderfully adept dialogue -- compelling story. in truth? all of what you expect from a good novel. feh to the naysayers!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: again, she is amazing
Review: lamott has done it again - a lyrical piece of work with fluid motions and patient ironies..she is in a league of her own.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Teenaged tennis goddess
Review: There are some good things to say about this book. Lamott is consistently skilled in her use of language, and every once in a while she writes a sentence that is truly astonishing in its beauty and insight. She constructs a plot that deals nicely with dilemmas of honesty and presents it in a way that would make a great discussion starter for a group of adolescents. But the plot is otherwise strange: the scenes involving Luther, the obsessive man in the bleachers who offers tips on how to improve her game, are particularly unconvincing. It isn't a particularly ambitious novel, especially considering the trvial consequences she chooses for her main character. But it did leave me thinking: if I am someone who cheats, does that make me a cheater? Jean-Paul Sartre might disagree with the conclusions Lamott draws.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Lamott's Works
Review: I have read all of Anne Lamott's works and find each and every one down to earth, revealing of the soul and true to life. Reading "Rosie" and "A Crooked Little Heart" my heart broke and at the same time acknowledged the same feelings of life growing up. In "Hard Laughter" I found myself reliving my own father's illness and eventual death to lung cancer and the dark humor that runs with deep grief. I look forward to Anne Lamott's next piece of literature.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Ick.
Review: I only finished this book because I was reading it for my book club. I found each of the characters to be not only unlikeable, but thoroughly unbelievable. Maybe LaMott is just too Californian for me, but I find her new-agey characters to be more caricature than real people. I suppose we were meant to find their quirkiness endearing, and their foibles to be human. None of the central characters rang true for me and I had no emotional response to their situations. I also found LaMott's writing style very overwritten and phony. She uses so many metaphors that seem completely out of place and ridiculous. For example, at one point she writes that a particular tennis court reminded Rosie of the inside of an airplane hangar. Get real. How many thirteen-year olds have spent time inside an airplane hangar? This is one that stands out, but on every page I found thoughts and dialogue by the characters that was utterly contrived. Having read 1 1/2 books by LaMott (I read half of "Operating Instructions" when my daughter was an infant and found that book to be very annoying), I doubt I'd ever read another work by LaMott!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: More, more, more!
Review: I adored this book the first time I read it, and I'm rereading it again now, a year later. I can't believe how many "not good" reviews there are here--are we reading the same book? CLH is, to me, a fast, smart, heartbreakingly-precise portrait of a "family" living in the prosaic world of growing up--not just Rosie's growing up, but Elizabeth's, Rae's, James's--everybody's. This is a story about what it feels like to care about things too much, and it's brilliant. Don't listen to them, Annie. Keep it coming.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Weak story line and not credible characters.
Review: I was very disappointed in this book, after having read Rosie. I felt that the character development was weak, and the story line meandering and too often boring. I forced myself to finish this book, mainly because I kept thinking it was going to pick up. Lamott has a great command of language, which makes this book even more frustrating to read since I felt often that she got too caught up in descriptive passages and not in the soul of the story she was trying to tell. It had so many of the right elements but ultimately did not hold together as a richly told tale that could capture the reader's heart.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: One of the best books I've read in a long time
Review: I'll admit that when I picked this book up, I didn't have very high hopes for it. It take long, however, until I was completely engrossed. I was moved to tears many times during the book and I have recommeded it to all of my friends.


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