NYCLady

Moving and intelligent

Revisado: 05-05-24

It takes a bit of getting used to the narrator’s sort of “period” performance but once you do it’s really perfect, and the book is sensitively, smartly written and informative. Exquisite.

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Solid material, rough delivery

Revisado: 07-25-23

This is a good overview about human prehistory that incorporates the latest findings in archeogenetics that’s well organized, concise, and interesting for people obsessed with this stuff - even if you’ve heard a lot of it before there are great tidbits and it’s well connected. But the lecturer’s reading, not speaking, but obviously reading every word in a very amateur, childlike way. I understand this is a professor and not a professional voiceover performer — but what’s great about most of these is they’re actual professors talking like they would to a class, in their element. This is the first one I’ve heard where they’re just reading and it sucks. Makes it hard to listen to.

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Intimate, devastating, brilliant

Revisado: 09-27-21

This book is absolutely gorgeous - so sad and real and familiar. It is absolutely deserving of all its many accolades, and it has received so many that I hardly need to leave my two cents to recommend it.

I’m only doing that because I’m shocked by the other user reviews. Who are these people? This is a novel, not an episode of Sesame Street. They’re complaining that the characters don’t “evolve”? First of all, they change immensely. Secondly, the story takes place over the course of the Marianne and Connell’s very young adulthood, between their final year of high school and then university. Who do you know that figures everything out in life by age 21 or 22? In reality, can people escape the pressures of their social class, the patterns of their upbringing, and overcome all of their insecurities or tie a neat bow around their complex intimate relationships, by that age?

And complaints about the timeline - do you all not understand the way this allows the world of the novel to grow outwards, to follow the flow of the characters thoughts so perfectly it always feels authentic and makes it impossible to put down, so that the reader is completely engrossed in the story, hardly ever aware that they’re reading at all?

Just because the book is about young people, I guess, doesn’t mean it is intended for them. This is not YA. Jesus.

Anyway, it is incredible.

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