MADreads

Shockingly good

April 18th, 2008 Liz - Central Library

Do you have a pile of back-up books at home?  Books you’ve bought (or were given) that you haven’t gotten to because they haven’t got a due date?  But books you really DO want to read one day?  Ones that you are pretty sure will be great?

I just read one from that pile… and it was truly fabulous.

Patron Saint of Liars is Ann Patchett’s first novel.  A young married woman from California has a general feeling of unsettledness in her life.  Not unhappiness, exactly.  Then she gets pregnant.  So she leaves the most minimal note for her husband (nothing said about the pregnancy) and travels across the country to a home for pregnant girls (though she is not a girl at all.)

The what-happens-next is not the central issue of the book, but you’d rather have ALL the suspense, I’d bet.  Naturally a book that takes place in a home for pregnant girls gets a reader thinking about mothers & daughters.  And of course there is loss here, but not the kind you’d think, necessarily, or in the way you’d think, necessarily.  Ann Patchett hasn’t written a bad book, I’d say, ever.  But this is one shockingly good first novel.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction