lives of girls and women

Got this book for Christmas -- it had been on the list for a while. I'm about 80 pages in and I'm just not going to finish it. The writing is labored and the story, such as it is, completely fails to hold my attention. The thing reads like it was written by an MFA grad student, someone who cares a lot about writing and wants very badly to be thought of as a good writer, but who just isn't. I mean, my god, enough with the lists already.

"This rickety wooden store, so narrow from front to back it looked like a cardboard box stood on end, haphazardly plastered with metal and painted signs advertising flour, tea, rolled oats, soft drinks, cigarettes, was always to me the sign that the town had ended. Sidewalks, street lights, lined-up shade trees, milkmen's and icemen's carts, birdbaths, flower borders, verandas with wicker chairs, from which ladies watched the street..."

"And as he talked a different landscape -- cars, billboards, industrial buildings, roads and locked gates and high wire fences, railway tracks, steep cindery embankments, tin sheds, ditches with a little brown water in them, also tin cans, mashed cardboard cartons, all kinds of clogged or barely floating waste -- all this seemed to grow up around us..."

So very grating. It's like someone told Munro that she should show but not tell, and she didn't quite understand how to pull that off.

Not recommended.