An Uncommon Education by Elizabeth Percer
My rating: 2/5 cats
ugh, i don’t want to write this review. because it’s not that the book is bad, it just never worked for me. there is something so cheeky and earnest about this book, but it’s like an amish girl going on her rumspringa. not that she’s trying to be gritty or shocking at all, but it just feels wrong, somehow, tentative, like she is trying to write dramatic irony way out of her depth without realizing it.
i feel like the author is probably a really really good person. she just isn’t great at writing characters. and i feel just awful writing a bad review for this book—it feels like slapping something sincere in the face. she knows a lot about wellesley, she did go there, after all, and that part shows, but she doesn’t know how to make a reader believe in her characters.
it is boring to read a character who is this emotionally cauterized, who seems to never do the things that a normal human would do in her various situations. but it doesn’t seem to be a conscious choice on the part of the writer, like she is trying to explore this element of damage and retreat and decision-making as a consequence of growth or adulthood. there is no art to the writing.
for example—naomi plays laertes in her production of hamlet. fine. but, the obvious choice would have been to make her hamlet, and to have her offstage life mirror that character’s own difficulties with confrontation and inaction, blah blah blah. and it is totally creative writing 101 amateur hour stuff, but it would have at least given some substance to the novel. but percer never makes that potentially more rewarding comparison. naomi is not quite a hamlet who wrestles with her choices, she simply drifts into making the laziest choices possible. she has no agency at all View Spoiler ». and it would be one thing if the point was that the life of the mind has profoundly negative impact on one’s emotional life, but i really just don’t buy her as some great genius. having a photographic memory is a fine tool, but she never has the drive a true scholar has. she is a dilettante with a wasted gift. she settles time and time again because she lacks the motivation to do anything. she comes across as wooden and unfeeling and robotic.
nothing in this book meshes, nothing has any purpose, nothing seems to have consequence enough to engage the reader. nothing ties this novel together.
for me.
you might like it.
i am putting this on my “books claiming to be just like secret history“ shelf, because although this book does not overtly make that claim, on the back cover it is compared to several things that are frequently compared to secret history so—transitive property, and that is why i read this book. but that is not the reason i didn’t like it. i just…didn’t.
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