5 comments about Angel's Crest: A Novel (Unabridged).

1. Superb and astounding--the initial plot involves a father who negligently leaves his three year old son in the truck for a few minutes while he follows some deer in the woods, resulting in the child's death. The underlying story is the portrait of a small northern California town, the tragic losses suffered by various characters, the legend of the angels rescuing five children during the blizzard of 1889, people's faith, people's inability to have faith, forgiveness, separation and reunion and the cycle of life and death. This author has created a masterpiece against a deceptively simple backdrop. I'd like to give a copy of this to everybody I know.



2. Dear Potential Reader! BEWARE! This book can really get you down. Personally, I consider this one as the most depressing book I have ever read. I am a mother and to me the number of forsaken children, not to mention the dead ones, present on first 50 pages of this book turned out to be too much. My adventure with "Angels Crest" finished with big histerical tears in the middle of the book and afterwards I just couldn't make myself read a word more. Moreover, the plot seems to be "too dense" - too many persons, too many tragedies, too little place for the writer to explore it all.
   
   So if you have small children of your own and want to keep your smiling mood for the weekend - DO NOT READ THIS ONE.



3. Leslie Schwartz takes us on a journey of discovery. The people in her novel are all deeply touched by a tragedy which resonates for each of them in a different way. Swartz is not afraid to have us stay with her characters through the daily experience of grief, regret, sadness. The gestures, the thoughts, the movements of her chracters' lives make real for us what they are going through. In that daily living we recognize ourselves.
   You will finish this book wiser than you were when you started.



4. I've never read Schwartz before, but will search out her other books now. This particular book was intriguing from the beginning. I guess I figured out how it must end, but kept hoping for that "happy ending." The story wouldn't have made sense if it hadn't turned out that way.



5. I found this book really easy to get in to. It's not a mystery or a thriller it's more a sociological study. We learn about the people who live in Angel's Crest (population 355) what makes them tick, how they feel and what they never seem to tell each other.
   
   There is almost an unwritten code of conduct amongst the people who live there;
   "...She had learned from living up here, that you didn't pry into other people's business. You waited until they offered it up and then you didn't say much about it either way."
   
   The characters were all very believable and on more than one occasion I was struck by how realistic their reactions and feelings were and what a perceptive study of people it was. I didn't find it depressing but can see why some people might. Because each person is 'laid bare' for the reader we discover the sorrows, mistakes and regrets they have, whereas normally when we 'meet' people we don't discover such intimacies, so this could be depressing if you choose to see it that way.
   I don't believe that people are normally as doom and gloom as this community appears, but because their thoughts and reactions are all related to the tragic event within their community and because we are discovering their vulnerabilities, it's understandable. The chapters alternate between seven different characters and although they sometimes cover the same situations, via the characters we see events from different perspectives.

No comments about Ransom Kidnapping in America, 1874-1974: The Creation of a Capital Crime (Perspectives in Sociology).

No comments about Así es el 'comando secuestros'. (miembros de grupo armado Euskadi Ta Askatasuna; País Vasco, España)(TT: This is the 'kidnapping commando') (TA: members ... Country, Spain): An article from: Epoca.

No comments about Life With the Comanches: The Kidnapping of Cynthia Ann Parker (Great Moments in American History).

No comments about THE QUASAR CAPER.

No comments about Crimes' Paradise: The Authentic Story of the Urschel Kidnapping.

No comments about Oliver Twist.

No comments about The Gallagher plot : Nick Carter Killmaster Series.

No comments about A Study in Scarlet (Unabridged).

5 comments about The Child in Time.

1. I see I'm not alone in loving Ian McEwan's books. I'm working my way through them all, but "The Child In Time" is one to stop and savor. As has been said by many others, McEwan's novels often revolve around protagonists who go through a trial or trauma not of their own making, and the ways in which they reach resolution or some sort of eventual peace. Many marriages do not survive the loss of a child, whatever the circumstances. And it does appear that Stephen and Julie will never reconcile once their small daughter, Kate, is abducted from a supermarket checkout line under her father's nose, in less time than it takes to say it. After the loss of Kate and a lengthy and fruitless search for her, the book becomes largely Stephen's story. As is often the case, each parent grieves differently, and their manners of grief cannot coexist. But even while Julie is absent, her presence remains strong. She is never far away from Stephen or the reader. To say more would not be fair to the first-time reader. But the ending seems appropriate and is very moving. I, for one, did not see it coming.
   
   It seems that few authors writing today are especially confident in their storytelling abilities and their readers' interest in or willingness to stay with them through complex, multi-layered narratives. McEwan isn't like that, and because he is so justifiably certain of his gifts, he spends leisurely, lengthy passages on characters and settings which don't -- at first blush -- seem to have any real function in the plot. But they always do, and finding out what these elements mean, and how they lead to the resolution of McEwan's novels, is part of what makes his writing so enjoyable. He doesn't labor over details, and yet I feel as though I know what his characters look and sound like, what their houses are like. I can feel the rain and smell the flowers in the gardens.
   
   McEwan's fascination with science almost always plays a part in his stories; Thelma, a secondary character in this novel, is a physicist, and I expect she sounds like a real one. (I don't know any.) It is always the role of McEwan's scientists to provide tangible, mathematical proof of the emotional stages his characters are going through. Time either renews or destroys, but it doesn't stand still. As long as this remains so, (and it is Thelma's job in "The Child in Time" to remind Stephen of this), Ian McEwan's subject matter will remain infinite.



2. McEwan manages to take the theme of a kidnapped child and turn it into a story of courage, love, and hope, without dredging it in sentimentality and triteness. Not as immersed in irony as is ON CHESIL BEACH, it nevertheless manages to leave a lasting impression both as a story and a well-written novel.



3. This is the eighth book of McEwan's that I have read, and it was not among my favorites. This was probably McEwan's most introspective novel so far, but I found myself getting bored with Stephen's thoughts. I enjoyed the plotline involving the disappearance of his daughter and how that tragedy affected his relationship with his wife. I liked his reflection on how he became a children's writer, but I thought the whole relationship with his publisher Charles and his wife a bit strange. Charles' wife's ramblings about Time were uninteresting, as was Stephen's work with the committee. I typically fly through McEwan, but certain parts of this one just had me stuck.
   
   While the title has many levels aside from Stephen's missing daughter, there were layers that I thought seemed irrelevant. If you prefer the more introspective McEwan novels, like Saturday, then you'd enjoy The Child in Time. This did not have the shock value of The Cement Garden or The Comfort of Strangers, or the epic novelty that made Atonement a huge success, but it's still McEwan through and through.



4. The two key themes of A Child in Time are contained in the title, which is a kind of a pun on the baby that arrives in time to save the marriage. There is the stolen child lost in time, Kate; Steven tries to keep her in time, to give her imaginary growth, but fails. Julie has to learn to allow her to be lost to a past time yet still loved in present time. There is the child out of time - Steven's revisiting his own former self in some supernatural experience. There is the fictional child of his novels, children forever children in the constructed world that fiction allows. And there is the adult who wants to return to the naivety and lack of responsibility of childhood, and actually attempts a real regression to that level. His attempt is catastrophic. The character Charles raises the issue of time quite early in the novel, when he comments that to children, there is no time; their world is somehow played out with little awareness of the passing of time or of a real future. The comment: "In every child there is a hidden adult and in every adult there is a hidden child", plays with changes in time's forward arrow. Charles's desire to return to the innocence and insouciance of childhood, we are told by Thelma, is a widespread problem amongst adults; it is accentuated as pathology in Charles.
   The novel, as most of McEwan's novels, travels to and fro in time with back flashes interspersing the narrative of the present, and a future never out of sight. Although the novel returns in time, and although Steven's memory does also, McEwan constantly reminds us that our present is the result of past decisions, past important moments of choice that cannot be retrieved or extirpated. Time travels on, and the missing Kate has to find her own place in that arrow of time in a way that will allow the parents to move on without her, yet with loving memories of her.
   Within this thematic, there are some lovely moments: I think it the only work of McEwan that has brought me to actual tears. But the tears are momentary. It has none of the poignancy of On Chesil Beach, or the enduring sense of loss or tragedy - but then, it is not a tragedy, so that is hardly surprising. The style is recognisably and wonderfully McEwan even while it lacks the more refined and subtle skills he has at his disposal today (the original copyright is 1987). Part of his lack of skill is in his methodology - his actual story telling. He is not able, as he is now, to get as expertly inside his characters and quarry their psychological depths.
   For me, his greatest failure centred on the actual stealing of Kate. I find it barely credible. I also find the failure to follow the psyches or the conversations of the couple at this time to be frustrating. He can't quite deal with the magnitude of his own plot at this point, and steps too far back from both action and characters for me. There are unexplained gaps in plot, jumps in logic, presumptions and omissions that stretch the reader's belief.
   I would not recommend it to anyone as their first McEwan, and I would certainly not recommend it to anyone as a marvel in its own right. Neither would I criticise it as a failed attempt. I would love to see what the more mature McEwan could do today with the same theme, but even the less experienced version indicates enormous promise, and is a pleasure to read. The disappointment occurs because we now know he can do better.



5. I've read lots of Mr. McEwan's work, and every other novel is brilliant. Unfortunately, this is the Other novel. Atonement and Enduring Love were wonderful, Saturday a disappointment, and Amsterdam a disaster. This is the worst yet. The plot centers around the kidnapping of the main character's young daughter and his reaction to the tragedy. There is no significant character development, a gratuitous Prime Minister, a suicide sweetly explained away by the deceased's wife, and pages of rambling, seemingly pointless prose. There is a certain redemption in the last few pages, but that does not offset the pain of the middle part. Try one of his other works instead.