Book Number 5

It took me two days, but I finally finished book number 5.
It was a really long book, but I had a nice time reading it. 639 pages jam packed with interesting literature.

The Novel: Tara Road
The Author: Maeve Binchy

Link: http://www.maevebinchy.com/tararoad.html

I always enjoy novels by Maeve Binchy, so I wasn't surprised that I enjoyed this one as well. I was proud of myself for taking on a novel this size with the knowledge that I still have 295 more books to read and only 358 days to read them.
This novel is full of depth with many characters intertwined. I found the character development was done wonderfully, with each character having a distinct personality.
Maeve Binchy does an excellent job transporting the reader right into the lives of her characters. I felt emotions for every person in the book, happy, sad, angry, irritated, baffled, etc. Some characters I wanted to hug, others to smack, others to grab and say "what the f?".
I could picture the scenes and locations in my mind so vividly. I really enjoyed this novel.
The one thing that bothered me was with the American characters. The main characters and scenes are in Ireland, thus the slang is Irish.....However I found the dialogue with the American characters she also used Irish words and slang (not as much, but even still) so it put me off a little bit. Aside from that, the dialogue flowed nicely (I read it in my head with an accent, it was nice...I sounded awesome).

I give "Tara Road" a rating of 4.25 out of 5.

I hadn't heard of this book before my trip to the library, but I was happy to have found it. I'm surprised that I hadn't heard of it previously as Tara Road is on Oprah's Book Club...although the book was written back in 1998, so I was pretty busy with University (& clubbing) back then.

Trying to find a link for this book, I discovered that it was made into a movie back in 2005. I am going to my local vid store as soon as I can to see if they have it. I wonder how the movie will measure up against the book, how my perceptions of each character will change. We'll see.....