It wasn't easy deciding which to read first, but I decided to go for Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter before delving later into the realm of Elizabeth Strout's The Burgess Boys.
Beautiful Ruins was NPR Fresh Air's Best Novel for 2012, amongst its many more outstanding literary accolades and its evocative front cover has been splashed over the pages of most of the magazines that I read on a regular basis, of late.
Two chapters in and I'm sold. After slogging my way through Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, her heavy-duty, latest novel delving deep into the converging of environmental, political, social and domestic issues amidst a claustrophobic, rural community in Appalachia, Beautiful Ruins' cinematic scope opens with precisely the sort of escapism the doctor ordered for Spring.
Ties that bind us to family and home appeal as the subject matter in Elizabeth Strout's new novel, in which the Minneapolis Star-Tribune describes as: “…beautiful and detailed writing. Strout’s manifestations of envy, pride, guilt, selflessness, bigotry and love are subtle and spot-on.”
Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for her poignant, riveting and memberable "Olive Kitteridge."
I haven't read Jess Walter before Beautiful Ruins but I have a feeling that I will be back tracking to some of his earlier works after this.
Janet Maslin of the New York Times describes Walter's latest offering as: "A monument to crazy love ... deeply romantic (with) vividly etched characters."
And: "Poignant, comical and marvelous … a mix of satire and love story," says Tom Nolan of the San Francisco Chronicle.
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