Rating: 3.1.5
Category: Fiction
Published: 2007
Audiobook
Review: 2/5 stars
You may remember that I posted about this book about a month ago. I had listened to the first couple of cds and decided it wasn't worth continuing. For some reason I decided to pick it up again and continue. I shouldn't have.
The book is about an 18 year-old girl from Tasmania who moves to New York to begin a new life. She finds a job at The Arcade, a huge used bookstore, with a staff of strange people. Not a whole lot happens for the first half of the book and then in the second half there is a little mystery about a lost Herman Melville manuscript that is more interesting but still not great. I just didn't care about any of the characters very much. The only one I liked was Pearl, who is a man who dresses as a woman and is taking medication to prepare for a sex-change operation.
Even though I didn't really like this book, there is one line that I really liked that comes up again and again. Rosemary often thinks of what Chaps, an older friend from Tasmania, used to say, "A book is always a gift." Isn't that the truth?
As for the content of this book, I rate it as "read at your own risk." Rosemary, the narrator, doesn't swear at all but some of the workers at the bookstore throw out f-words here and there--a total of 7 or 8, maybe. There is also a sex scene that's just...weird.
