Review 457: Day

Day by Michael Cunningham
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

There’s something about this book, the characters, that I really couldn’t connect to, and I felt distant. Maybe it had to do with how they were introduced, well you were thrown in like you knew who these people were and only later, after some interactions and such, it is revealed how they are related or who they are. It threw me off a little.

There are a few sections where the dialog lacks the tags of names or he/she said, which maybe flows better, but I lost track of who was saying what and had to go back over it a couple of times. This would be no problem in an audiobook, but I read the print.

Then there’s the six-year-old girl who is learning her alphabet. She writes this letter to her parents about keeping the windows closed and a longer letter to her uncle. Isn’t she learning how to read? There are these little things, and how you are made to keep guessing, not put down exactly what’s going on; it didn’t help for me to connect with the story.

I will say the writing quality is solid, it is a well written book as far as language and sentence structure. The plot is how I expected, as the title suggests, just one day, so we get minutia and dailyness that honestly got a bit tedious in the first section.

For me this was just okay, not great and certainly not bad. I wonder if I had listened to the audio if the book would have gone better for me, perhaps.