While I Was Gone by Sue Miller Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of While I Was Gone
Book Review: A chick-flick of a book
Summary: 1 Stars
First you get to marry a doctor, then you get bored and become a Bohemian, find some drawbacks there and so finally you get to marry somebody that understands and appreciates you. You get to take care of and understand animals as a veterinarian. But your life still seems to miss some spark and so a murder mystery is thrown into the mix. All of your friends are affiliated with Harvard, Berkeley, or some other high prestige place--no Illinois State or blue color workers for you. This was a truly awful book written for dreamy status-seekers with no empathy or understanding of the real world.Book Review: Characters too unlikable for me
Summary: 3 Stars
This book was in places very beautifully written but for all of that I found the heroine and the choices she made quite selfish. Here's a woman with a loving husband, a prosperous career she loves and not a worry in the world. She's willing to toss it all away because, to me, she seems either bored or regretful that her life is so easy (we should all be so lucky!). This made her very difficult to sympathize with and made me want to strangle her. I did enjoy the fact that in the end her "problem" was going to stare her in the face for a good number of years to come. Serves her right, if you ask me . . . Book Review: When past meets present
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the first Sue Miller novel I have read. I picked it up from my wife's collection of unread novels when I had run out of my usual suspense/thrillers. To my surprise I found myself very quickly caught up in the story and the characters. Sue Miller is an excellent writer. She has a good eye for the details of domestic life and family dynamics which provide a good backdrop for the mysteries and secrets of vet Jo Becker. Jo is in an apparently happy marriage to Daniel, a minister. It's her second marriage. One day a friend from the past shows up as a client at her vet clinic. This leads us on a journey through Jo's memories of a time in the 60s when she escaped from her first marriage and lived in a group home/commune in Cambridge Mass. This hippy period of her life ends with the tragic murder of one of her roommates by a person or persons unknown. In the present Jo learns the identity of the killer, someone with whom she is tempted to stray until she learns his terrible secret. Jo wrestles with her conscience and reveals all to her husband who is shocked more at her intent to betray him than he is by the murderer's identity. How Jo deals with these challenges is dealt with in a well crafted way.
I highly recommend this novel.
Book Review: Our Past Will Define Us--only if we choose to
Summary: 4 Stars
This book is packaged and presented as a thriller novel. Raves such as `...a beautiful and frightening book, one that many readers will find difficult to forget' and `Gripping, close to the bone fiction' are printed all over the front and back covers. With this, I started reading with the expectations of a good scare.
However, as the story unfolded, I found myself breezing through the pages, hoping that the next page or chapter would finally be `scary'. So its not at all something `thrilling.'
Pace of the book is moderately dragging, picking up only ¾ of the way. I finished the book feeling initially disappointed because it did not deliver its promise of being frightening (now I know to take raves with a grain of salt). However the book overall conveyed excellent values that we can get from our life's crises.
A non-climatic plot but I appreciate the realness and consistency Sue Miller gives her characters. Jo, for example, has always been elusive, and unconsciously unable to form any extremely close relationships with anyone--not even her daughters. She is a bit of an escapist, learning early on that she can run away from her problems (as she did with her first marriage), and throughout the story, when she is faced with an issue, running away often crosses her mind. She is also perfectly human, being bored with her marriage with the town pastor, hence when Eli first came into town, she indulged herself with a few fantasies of "what if's", but never actively acted on it. She also wasn't your typical pastor's wife. She was not at all religious, didn't go to church, and did not meddle with her husband's affairs. The husband, though a pastor, wasn't spared from getting hurt and jealous, when Jo confessed that prior to Eli disclosing that he is a murderer, she was actually attracted to him. He was cold to her for weeks, and when Jo's mother had a minor accident, he suggested that Jo's going to her mother's house would do them a good break. Their 3 daughters, they all had different characters, each of them charming in their own ways, and also gave headaches in their own separate ways.
One of the story's focus, is change--the adage is true, its never too late to change. We may be affected by our past and mistakes, but we are not defined by them. From time to time, in life, we need drastic changes to get us out of a depressing situation (Jo's running away from 1st marriage). And no matter how "used to" we think we are with ourselves, we will never truly know our being unless we have been subject to certain circumstances. And that to move on, we must first forgive and accept ourselves as what we truly are.
Book Review: One of my favorites
Summary: 5 Stars
This book can't be beat for shear character webs...it discusses so many different family relationships- such as husband/wife, mother/daughter, old flames, old friends...definitely witty and entertaining while shockingly realistic. A must read, definitely keeps you interested.