I don’t understand how a book published this year for the first time is published as an international bestseller. How are you a bestseller before you were printed to be sold, The Good Goodbye?
That confusion aside, this is a book worth reading. It’s like Gillian Flynn for people who can’t handle the grit of Flynn or at the very least need more than The Grownup, which Flynn published at the end of last year and could be read front to back before your coffee gets cold.
I didn’t know what was going to happen until the end. It’s a whodunit without any kitsch or “cozy mystery” categorization. The nonlinear weaving of the narrative between characters was ambitious and interesting. I liked to dislike Rory and yet at the end (sans spoiler) it broke my heart. I had so many questions and I love a book that makes me question the foundation of the characters, relationships, and mystery. It made me race through the pages trying to figure it out. I fell asleep on Thursday night with the book in my hands and woke up to a sock as my bookmark (courtesy of Rob) and I picked up where I left up, not moving on Friday morning until I finished it (Good Friday, I wasn’t late for work or anything).
Carla Buckley, cannot wait to read more of your books! I hope they’re all this good. And I’m looking forward to the movie because this is so obviously going to be a movie…
Lesson of #9 – A book published this year: A book doesn’t need to be old and enduring to be good. A new book can tell just as fascinating and tell just as interesting a story as an enduring classic.
This is not a book I would normally read. It was heartbreaking to the nth degree, but my gosh, it was a good book! My book club is discussing it next week and it wasn’t until after I finished it that I tried to fit it into our Mother-Daughter Reading Challenge criteria. It’s not just an international bestseller (#6) but a No.1 international bestseller, among other accolades:
Bestseller on all the national lists in the U.S.
Top 5 of the New York Times Trade Fiction bestseller list for over a year
Foreign rights have been sold in more than 30 countries
More than 2 million copies in print
Became a #1 international bestseller
This weekend Rob and I went to the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, which felt like a field trip to inform the reading of this book. The Tenement Museum is located at 97 Orchard Street, not far from the Elizabeth Street tenements, where our protagonist lived before taking the orphan train to the Midwest. We attended the Irish Outsiders experience, which fit well with the Irish heritage of the Orphan Train protagonist (not to mention echoing the experiences of the Irish immigrants in Brooklyn and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). In fact, downstairs at the Tenement Museum they had many books for sale including Orphan Train, Brooklyn, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, among many other of my recent reads.
Reading Orphan Train while waiting for our tour on the stairs of 97 Orchard St, which head up into one of the Tenement Museum’s tours. Book your tour early, multiple tours actually sell out every hour! We had to wait about 2 hours for Irish Outsiders and we got the last two tickets for that tour.
When NYC regulations for tenements became more stringent the owner of the building evicted the current tenants and kept the building for the commercial space downstairs alone. When Abram and Jacobsen discovered this time capsule they transformed it into the museum and could you get anything more authentic? Locked up and preserved for about 50 years, exploring these tenements is like going back in time. It brought to life the storyscapes of all these immigrant stories I’ve read (and am yet to read).
The experience of reading Orphan Train and exploring the Irish Outsiders segment of the Tenement Museum blend together into a single sadness. Though I was literally sobbing last night as I tried to tell Rob about Orphan Train and earlier in the evening he tried to confiscate the book as I cried my way through the pages, I’m still very glad to have read it. It was a good book. It was sad, but it was strong. It was a story of resilience and perspective, of love and loss, of the things we lose and the things we keep, the people (good and bad) who affect us, and most of all, the way everything comes full circle in the end.
“To Pete, For all that is meant to be. xo Doris” — that is the inscription inside the cover of this book. I glazed over it when I started reading but once I finished it I was plagued by the meaning hidden-in-plain-sight in that simple inscription. Is Pete her Commander, a loveless pairing? Her Luke, her love that she was torn away from by circumstance? Was he her Nick? Did he sacrifice their relationship so that she might have a real life?
The inscription was as powerful as a mini-book club. I think I bought this book at a library book sale at Alderney Landing, so Doris of the Greater Halifax Area (or Pete, who got rid of the thoughtfully selected book), what did you mean? I need to know.
This book is my New York Times bestseller, but it was so, so much more. To name a few literary awards, this vintage Margaret Atwood received:
And it’s been challenged on high school reading lists from past to present. I don’t blame concerned parents in a way. It is very violent, sexually explicit, and the suicidal tendencies cannot be a positive influence. Nevertheless, exposing young readers to that kind of mind-widening perspective and challenging high schoolers to really think about society and gender inequality is a pretty powerful message.
The Atlantic wrote about this book in March 2015. Yes, 2015, roughly three decades after this novel debuted. The article marveled at how even now we’re not quite ready for such a radical work. Radical is a good word for it. It was mind-blowing to consider that dystopian reality. I don’t even like dystopian fiction and I was fascinated by The Handmaid’s Tale. When they were casting the movie in the late eighties they struggled to secure an actress for the main character, or so I read in the aforementioned Atlantic article, because “many actresses feared the stigma of being associated with such an explicitly feminist work” (The Atlantic, 2015)
Now, how in the world will I find this 1990 movie with it’s inappropriately racy cover? (Promising me that Atwood’s powerful message will be watered down to the very thing that’s keeping The Handmaid’s Tale out of schools.)
Mother Daughter Reading Challenge 