My sister-in-law Mary Ashmore, the banker, reads voraciously. She gives grocery sacks full of books to the Salvation Army thrift store. But she doesn't write about them.
She drops hints during phone calls or dinners. She gives me books. But she hasn't told us what she thinks about her reading. Okay, she has lots of really good excuses. Now she's moved to Chicago and, in addition to trying to find new housing, she's figuring out a new job. So, I concede her an asterisk because of the book she gave me for Christmas.
It was The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans. It's the perfect book for the busy person:
The first third of the book is fantastic. Evans introduces and fleshes out attractive and interesting characters. He describes in exquisitely frightful, slow motion detail a horrible accident. His family-system analysis of the reactions of the survivors is wonderfully sympathetic and authentic. Their shortcomings made me sad and reminded me of my own. Their little victories made my heart sing. I was ready for a big finish.
That's not what I got.
The characters I'd come to like and care about the most were shuffled off into the background, and what started out as an epic story of family, crisis and survival became a romance novel.
I still can't figure it out. Evans obviously put a lot of care and skill into creating the characters and the environment of the first part of the book. Why did he abandon them and go for the soap opera?
And the denouement? Well, there's a suicide that seems to make no sense (even less than those of my two former students last winter) and a reconciliation that makes sense for only one of the three characters. It's such a fairy tale that Snow White sounds realistic.
Maybe after writing the first part of the novel he started imagining a big check for the film rights. (Do I hear a Robert Redford production, starring the Redford guy and The English Patient co-star, Academy Award-nominated Kristin Scott Thomas that began filming in New York last week and begins shooting in Livingston, Montana on June 2? What? No Clint and Merrill?)
Maybe he saw the success of The Bridges of Madison County.
Or it may be he saw the recent study that showed that women buy the overwhelming majority of fiction books, and that romance novels are hugely popular (see the sacks of books Mary hauls to the Salvation Army).
The book cover blurb announces that Nicholas Evans lives in London and is working on his next novel. I won't be waiting.
Now, my reactions may well be related to my gender and there may be a Martian-Venusian dichotomy here, so, I would really like to hear other reactions to this book--especially from women.
Please, write. Tell me and a little bit of the world what you think.
Its plot structure is superb for sporadic reading. I finished it last winter over the course of several weeks.
A Review from January Magazine
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