CD-Two boys adopted at early age ?find? their mother as a result of the mother saving one of the boys from being hit by a car; but being hit herself.

Beautifully written story about a father and his three motherless sons whose lives are transformed by an accident and one very special eleven year old girl. ( )

Another Ann Patchett book that manages, through wonderful writing, to put you in the book, not just in your chair reading the book.
Many memorable scenes and passages, from the earliest pages (Doyle was tired. His grief was so fresh he hadn't begun to see the worst of it yet. He was still expecting his wife to come down the stairs and ask him if he felt like splitting an orange.) to the coming-to-the-end pages (With those few words, so true and therefore easily given, she all but fell down next to him on the couch in a swoon of happiness.)
I give it 4 stars instead of 5 only because it is a cold and snowy book, and also, I got to feeling like we'd NEVER get out of the hospital. ( )

The almost melodious writing style of Ann Patchett is, of course, this book's best feature. And, as I am coming to understand is typical Patchett, the story before the story truly brought me in: a stolen Virgin Mary statue, a question of what it means to be family, rife with sibling rivalry, single parenting and trans-racial adoption. That was a story that was full of potential.

And I really liked huge chunks of Run, but most of it felt just like that -- palpable potential resting underneath: the woman who claimed to be the birth mother, and was she or was she just a groupie and the creepy, loving way she stalked her biologic sons. The saintly, dying Catholic priest uncle, and the did he or didn't he actually have the power to heal the sick. The forgotten mayor of Boston, fading into obscurity, trying to live by proxy through his sons. The prodigal son, returned home, a murderer and a thief, but possibly a modern Robin Hood, with a heart of gold and a knack for saving children. The problem is that by shifting around between all of these stories, none of them were really ever given an opportunity to come into their own.

The ending came too quickly and, as I'm also beginning to realize is typical Patchett, with a completely unnecessary time jump that left way too much unexplored. I would read the heck out of a story about an ichthyologist turned doctor turned ichthyologist (goodness knows I'm one quarter-life crisis away from writing an autobiography about the topic) and Patchett played with a lot of interesting concepts about why people go into medicine in specific, and careers as a chance of penance in general, but it A) had nothing to do with the first 300 pages and B) she didn't exactly do the topic justice in the 10 pages she had to deal with it. It added little to the book.

I'm giving Ann Patchett's fiction one more chance before I resign myself to the idea that it was truly Lucy Grealy who made Truth & Beauty come alive. ( )

I got to page 22. Nowhere near as beautifully written as Bel Canto. I understand the impulse to write something more grounded than that book, but there was something a bit anaemic and flat about the whole thing (is that a mixed metaphor?).