Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro - Review

This post is a brief, brief summary of our meeting a couple weeks ago.

Discussion Review: for The Flats Road; Heirs of the Living Body; Princess Ida

Did you enjoy the stories?  Why or why not?  

• We enjoyed the detail the author uses in describing things or events in her stories, but the story lines themselves are not all that exciting.

This book is a novel and a collection of short stories all a the same time.  What about each story allows it to stand on its own?  How do the stories tie together?  

• Each story has it's own main point/aspect but they do not tie into eachother, other than having the same characters. So you could just read Princess Ida, without reading the first two stories in the book. But you wouldn't want to jump all over and randomly select stories to read because they do go in chronological order of Del's life.

Did reading these three stories make you want to read the rest of the book?  What about the characters makes them compelling?

• Most of us did not read the rest of the book. There's a small interest in learning how Del evolves and grows, but because the stories did not grab our attention, it was easy to put aside. One attendee (Tessa :) ) did read the entire novel and enjoys Alice Munro. So it really came down to personal preferences.

My memory is a bit fuzzy, so I hope that I somewhat accurately summarized things. If something needs to be clarified, please do so :)