Fotografía de autor
4 Obras 39 Miembros 2 Reseñas

Sobre El Autor

Mary W. Walters is an award-winning author and editor who has worked with academics for nearly twenty years. She is the former awards facilitator at the University of Saskatchewan.

Incluye el nombre: Mary Walters Riskin

Obras de Mary W. Walters

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Género
female

Miembros

Reseñas

I was expecting something rather light-hearted, based on the cover and the description.

It isn't.

Rita is trapped in a horrible marriage with a man who pretty much married her to get free housekeeping and childcare for his utterly horrible children. And then he starts to "work" at home, and rather than him chipping in and dealing with HIS kids, he abdicates...and abdicates even more when his mother moves in with him and contributes nothing except added stress for Rita. Plus, he wants her to have a baby!

Eventually Rita does develop a spine, but during most of the book she is downtrodden. And even after the spine-growing- she's still stuck with the obnoxious stepkids, her selfish and oblivious husband who is not even supporting the family, etc.

This was well-written, but very NOT light, and very sad.

I gave it 3 stars because it IS well-written, but also is far more depressing than the cover suggests.
… (más)
 
Denunciada
cissa | Sep 19, 2016 |
Esta reseña fue escrita por el author.
Skin Lane is a short masterpiece, a compelling psychological drama with all of the page-turning attributes of a good mystery. Neil Bartlett, its author, is a prolific playwright as well as a novelist, and his focus in this story is a 46-year-old man whom we know mostly as Mr. F. He is one of the last generation of skilled cutters who worked for the 300 furriers who plied their wares on Skin Lane and neighbouring streets in the City of London in the first half of the 20th century. As the novel opens, Mr. F. has lived the same unfulfilling, solitary, virginal life for three decades, going by train to work each day at the same time, home again each night, wandering the city or visiting art galleries on the weekends–his routine unbroken, his mind numb even to its tedium.

It is the mid-sixties and it is London: and we can see that all around him the world is changing. His generation and those who have gone before may be mired in tradition and obligation and doing what is right and proper, but young people are ignoring all the rules, breaking them at every turn. It appears Mr. F. has been left behind, has missed his chance at… what? That is the question he must ultimately answer – although for a long time it seems he doesn’t even know there is a question, and that he doesn’t really care. But we soon learn that he is watching, from the corner of his eye, from beneath his lowered lids: he sees the life that pulses just beyond his grasp in the taut bodies of the young.

Mr. F. starts having a recurring dream that appears to have its roots in his childhood reading of Beauty and The Beast. The dream, a nightmare really (except that there is something deeply compelling about it too – as there are in so many good nightmares) begins to wake him up to his own sexuality, but in a dark way: intertwining it with the bloody work he does.

Anyone who has dreamed about a specific person and known that he or she must have seen that other person in real life, but can’t remember where or when, as I have done, will recognize the central mystery in this novel: Who is the young man who figures in Mr. F’s nightmares, dead, beautiful, hanging upside down, apparently murdered in Mr. F.’s own bathroom? And what do the dreams portend?

Skin Lane is a gripping read, building in intensity, and while we are compulsively reading forward in spite of our dread of the outcome, we are also absorbing the smells and fascinating facts about a world even now just newly dead – where in a whole “Hidden World” of London, through winter’s cold and summer’s heat, men on the top floors of a narrow building cut the skins of animals to pieces, and sewed them into expensive new skins that men would later use to decorate their most prize possessions: their wives and mistresses.

Bartlett’s clever conversational tone and his apparently infinite capacity for detail draws us in to his confidence. It convinces us that this writer has the inside track on this world, and on the enigmatic man he has created—just one example of the millions of people in the world who lead outwardly unremarkable lives but who (we know) must be capable of anything.

See the rest of this review at http://marywwaltersbookreviews.wordpr...
… (más)
 
Denunciada
MaryWWalters | Dec 26, 2012 |

Premios

Estadísticas

Obras
4
Miembros
39
Popularidad
#376,657
Valoración
½ 3.6
Reseñas
2
ISBNs
8