Title: Contrived, overlong nonsense
Product review: The good news: this book has a clear, swift style, an affecting closing vignette, and a solid opening chapter. But after that first chapter, you hit the first one: our fourteen year old narrator describes someone's hair as "shiny like the promises in magazines." These overwrought, cloying metaphors start popping up every few pages until soon, the whole book is overwrought and cloying. In 328 pages, Ms. Sebold attempts to capture ten years in the lives of at least ten people, one of them a narrator looking down from "heaven." Of course, this task is impossible if one wishes to do it with any complexity or subtlety, so Ms. Sebold instead relies heavily upon predictable New Age gobbledygook. Fans of contemporary, realistic literary fiction (Russo, McDermott, Morrison, Cunningham), take note: this is not for us. It is a readable, shallow, "heartening" mainstream book. Don't believe the hype.
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