What I am about to do is very difficult. I really want to plug this book, so other people will pick it up and love it too. I don't know how to categorize it, much less what to put in this review. So here goes nothing.
When I first saw this book a few years ago in Wal-Mart, I
…more immediately wrote it off as "chick lit." Mostly, because of the flapper girl on the cover. Then about a month ago, I saw her again looking at me straight in the eye, at the library. So I gave her another chance.
As as I read the first sentence which is the title for my review, I realized I had stumbled into something special.
The book is divided into two stories, a science fiction love story & and a sprawling epic.
The first story is told by an 83 year old woman, Iris Chase Griffin.She has lived an extraordinary life like marrying a business tycoon really young and sailing all around the world with him on the maiden voyage of The Queen Mary cruise liner ship in the thirties. But there also a lot of tragedies that occur in her life as well.
She is writing her memoirs for her estranged granddaughter,Sabrina that her drug addicted daughter and evil sister-in-law never let her see. Iris has kept tabs on Sabrina and knows all about her. She also knows with her heart condition this is her final chance to set the records straight for her granddaughter and let her know how special she was to Iris even thought have never really talked.
The other story is science fiction love saga supposedly written by Iris's obnoxious, irrepressible kid-sister Laura, which was published after she died in a freak car accident. The novel was called "The Blind Assassin". It is about these two unnamed lovers, that meet in secret and drink, make love and tell goofy science fiction stories to each other.
One of them ties in perfectly with Iris's story on many levels, and other one is a really silly comic book one about alien women who grow on trees and laugh and agree with whatever the men say, and satisfy every desire they want every minute of the day. But soon the men realize that this gets kind of boring after a while.
The Blind Assassin was my favorite part because it reminds of me of a graphic novel. I like that the author interspersed the stories together. It kept me craving more information from Iris's true story and the Blind Assassin gave me a break from Iris. She was a decent narrator. But she is a total snob at times, and has this very annoying "victim complex" that she carried around with her into her old age.
The one big complaint I have is that there too many characters and things going at the same time and it makes parts of this book extremely hard to shovel through. The parts where Iris blathers on and on about her entire family tree for at least fifty pages are a good example of what I am talking about. It was instances like this when I wanted to put the book down, but I kept reading it to see what happened in the end and it was rewarding and well worth it. (less)
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