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Songs Without Words Reviews
Packer Songs : Songs Without Words Reviews
| 14 of 15 people found the following review helpful  A Journey Through Disordered Thinking, By This review is from: Songs Without Words (Hardcover) "Songs Without Words," by Ann Packer, is a realistic novel dealing with the interior lives of five members of an extended suburban American family during a period of prolonged psychological crisis. This contemporary Bay Area family consists of two branches. The more normal and apparently contented Palo Alto branch consists of Liz, Brody, and their two teenage children, Joe and Lauren. Across the Bay in Berkeley lives Sarabeth, the second part of this extended family. Sarabeth is Liz' virtual sister and life-long best friend. In midlife, Sarabeth is still alone and lonely--a woman with a long history of sabotaging her long-term happiness though repeated dead-end relationships with married men. Liz and Sarabeth have been inseparable since their teens, when Sarabeth's mother committed suicide and she came to live in Liz' family while her father pursued his career and a new life on the East Coast. Their sisterly bond is strong but unhealthy. It is built on a shaky foundation of one-way... Read more 25 of 31 people found the following review helpful  Intriguing Premise Becomes Boring Novel, By This review is from: Songs Without Words (Hardcover) I was anxious to read SONGS WITHOUT WORDS since I greatly enjoyed Ann Packer's first novel THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN'S PIER. "SONGS" starts well with a flashback to 1976 a time when Sarabeth and Liz, the two lead female characters, are best friends and high school students. Sarabeth is actually living with Liz's family in their Palo Alto home as her life was disrupted when her mother committed suicide and her father moved back east. We flash forward thirty years to present day Northern California and find Liz is now a typical suburban housewife with a successful husband in the high tech industry and a teenage son and daughter. Sarabeth is still single in her mid to late forties doing some free lance creative things like "staging" houses for realtors, making lampshades and we presume often living off the inheritance from her deceased parents. Sarabeth is also mourning being dumped by her latest lover who happened to be married with kids and trying to come to terms with some realities... Read more 7 of 7 people found the following review helpful  Wish I hadn't bothered to buy it., By budababy (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews This review is from: Songs Without Words (Vintage Contemporaries) (Paperback) I agree with so many other reviewers here: this was not a very good book. The idea of the story intrigued me but the two women were uninteresting and even a little annoying. But more than the women or the plot, what bothered me the most was the poor writing. The author writes paragraphs of excessive detail that don't do anything at all for the story, don't tell me about a character, don't move the story forward, nothing. More annoying than that are sentences like this: "Esther was an elderly woman Sarabeth had sort of adopted." Huh? Who is saying this? This is like some kind of authorial intrusion to explain things to the reader, because she couldn't do it within dialogue. Also the entire first paragraph of chapter three which explains the company Brody works for - I kept wanting to shout, "Show, don't tell!" - one of the very first lessons in any creative writing class.Perhaps this book was rushed into print. Perhaps, as someone else suggested, she needed more help from... Read more |
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