The Burgess Boys: A Novel Hardcover – Deckle Edge Author: Visit Amazon's Elizabeth Strout Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1400067685 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, March 2013: It can’t be easy to sit down and write a new novel after your last, Olive Kitteridge, won the Pulitzer Prize (in 2009). The pressure! The pressure! In The Burgess Boys, novelist Elizabeth Strout somehow manages to survive whatever next-book anxiety while at the same time revisiting the themes and types of characters that have made her famous: plainspoken Mainers (some transplanted now to Brooklyn) bound together by both love, competitiveness and the issues of the day. Here, hotshot lawyer Jim and bighearted Bob Burgess come together over a politically incorrect prank perpetrated by their sister’s son--and discover that their distrust of each other has never really gone away. But then, neither has their love. Nobody does buried conflict and tortured familial relations better than Strout. --Sara Nelson
From Booklist
Pulitzer Prize–winning Strout (Olive Kitteridge, 2008) delivers a tightly woven yet seemingly languorous portrayal of a family in longtime disarray. Brothers Jim and Bob Burgess, and sister Susan, are mired in a childhood trauma: when he was four, Bob unwittingly released the parking brake on the family car, which ran over their father and killed him. Originally from small Shirley Falls, Maine, the Burgess brothers have long since fled to vastly disparate lives as New York City attorneys. Egoistic Jim is a famous big shot with a corporate firm. Self-effacing Bob leads a more low-profile career with Legal Aid. High-strung Susan calls them home to fix a family crisis: her son stands accused of a possible hate crime against the small town’s improbable Somali population. The siblings’ varying responses to the crisis illuminate their sheer differences while also recalling their shared upbringing, forcing them finally to deal with their generally unmentioned, murky family history. Strout’s tremendous talent at creating a compelling interest in what seems on the surface to be the barest of actions gives her latest work an almost meditative state, in which the fabric of family, loyalty, and difficult choices is revealed in layer after artful layer. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This is the first novel from Strout since her Pulitzer Prize–winning, runaway best-seller, Olive Kitteridge, and anticipation will be high. --Julie Trevelyan
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Direct download links available for The Burgess Boys: A Novel – Deckle Edge Free PDF
- Hardcover: 326 pages
- Publisher: Random House; First Edition edition (March 26, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1400067685
- ISBN-13: 978-1400067688
- Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
At the risk of being very unpopular among all my fellow reviewers who adore Elizabeth Strout and love her new novel, THE BURGESS BOYS, I'm afraid I am going to have to take the middle road in my evaluation of it.
Totally predictable and, for this reviewer anyway, utterly boring, it's difficult for me to say to whom this novel would appeal most. My best guess is those readers who enjoy latent, passive prose.
An apt adjective for Strout's style in THE BURGESS BOYS is subdued. She has a knack for ordinary realism and capturing her characters' quirky and forbearing New England relationships but there is always an underlying hopelessness beneath the surface which disheartened me.
Although Strout's prose is quite lovely, the story is a spirit-sapping slog through sodden, dysfunctional family melodrama that simply works too hard to say something profound. There is a statement proclaimed at one point, that "Everyone's happy. Freedom from white guilt makes everyone happy" but the irony is no one is ever really happy. The prevailing mood of depression and the overriding sense of alienation and loneliness only kept me at arm's length from the heart and soul of the primary characters: the Burgess siblings - Jimmy, Bobby and Susan, their spouses and ex-spouses, and Susan's troubled son, Zach.
Unfortunately for this reader, Strout's characterizations could not pull me into the world she attempted to create for them. Rather than being multi-dimensional characters of depth they are sadly stuck in stereotypes.
Strout is subtle in showing how empty and pointless the lives of her characters are but their desolation and abject loneliness are never lifted. Their story just plods heavily, anticlimactically along.
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