The Five Towns

By -
The Five Towns by Leslie Tonner



The Five Towns is a very descriptive look at suburban life from 1950 to 1980. Three decades of family drama, prejudice, bigotry, rumors, gossip and community standards. Tonner has a strong narrative and point of view with the ability to tell more than one side to a complicated story with beautiful style. I was immediately fascinated by the everyday life of people within The Five Towns. There were so many different stories to tell from the Jewish family moving from the city looking a for a new start, to the gentiles who felt as if their way of life was being infringed on, to the pregnant maid who was struggling to survive while supporting her mother and daughter. The stories were there. The execution was there. But the stories diverged midway through the novel and never quite found their way again.
It honestly felt like Tonner was trying to hone in on one family and in doing so felt the need to eradicate the other families from the story entirely. Characters that we had been introduced to early on in the novel and were prevalent throughout the pages would disappear and we would learn of their fate in the passing words of an unremarkable character. Or characters would die in a way that was supposed to seem tragic but in my opinion seemed forced or unnecessary. The storylines flatlined later in the book and the main characters began to lose interest to me.

This novel started out strong and held so much promise but the further I got into it, the less of my attention it held. I was intrigued enough to finish and I really did enjoy Tonner’s writing style. I just wish the plot had been well rounded and felt finished instead of abruptly executed.I give this 3 out of 5 stars.                                                                                                                                              

Thank you Netgalley for the advanced review copy I was given in exhange for an honest review. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steve Johnson

By -
Image
Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steve Johnson Bringing to life the story of a notorious pirate to a modern audience isn’t an easy task. We’re too used to the comfort of easy travel, the mythos of pirates and the commercialized imagery produced by movies and television. Images of Jack Sparrow and Long John Silver have been part of entertainment for so long that the idea of true piracy and all it’s ruthlessness has almost been washed away. It isn’t until you’re able to wash away the false images and submerge yourself into the actual history that you can see piracy for it’s truly brutal nature. It also brings up many questions about governments, laws, corporations, scandal, colonization and other factors that allowed piracy to flourish and exist in the manner that it did for so long. Piracy didn’t exist in a bubble. Enemy of All Mankind takes the story of one pirate, who helped usher in the Golden Age of Piracy, and exa
Read more

Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack

By -
Image
Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack          In my case it is always the image of Odetta that comes to mind when I hear her name. The tall, undeniably Black woman, hair in an afro, guitar in hand. It must be that I simply did not know enough about her life, her struggle, and even her music to convey more than that image. But her image is memorable and her presence something not easily described. This book fills in the gaps in the story of Odetta that I didn’t know. Looking back at my childhood, her most memorable songs are the ones I’ve known most of my life, singing in my school’s chapel along with hundreds of other Black students, the words having meaning that I can only truly comprehend decades later as a Black woman.          Zack takes his time with this biography, letting the readers learn as much about Odetta as we do the time from whence she came. Her migration from Alabama to California, her feelings of coming from a loveless, forced marriage,
Read more

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

By -
Image
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood I’m going to cut right to the chase. This book is well written but we didn’t need it. I expected more. I wanted more and this fell flat. I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale , more than once, and I genuinely enjoyed it. The single narrative of Offred lent itself to the story well and it was genuinely a terrifying society. I watched the first two series of the show and though I have my reservations about it, I still thought it was a good show. It does a great job answering questions that the book could not because of its singular narrative. It filled out the world. This book revolves around three narratives: Aunt Lydia, who we know had a helping hand in stripping women of their sense of self and molded them to be controlled by the men of Gilead; Agnes, raised in Gilead with a Commander as father, privileged and set to marry well; and Daisy, a teenager raised in Canada hating Gilead and the abuses women endured that she’s learned about since she
Read more