Once again, Maureen Lee brings us to her side of Britain and its indefatigable women. In this book entitled, 'Kitty and Her Sisters' - Kitty McCarthy is the central figure among a group of four sisters with another four brothers all living in Liverpool. She comes from a working class family and she is the focus of the novel because of her unorthodox ideas of finding happiness and life and her desire not to follow in the usual footsteps of a modern British woman.
What happens in the novel are consequences mainly to the decisions of Kitty that are quite unorthodox and do not reflect what women would usually do if faced with the same situation. Her character wants to live her life in her own terms and she is willing to go through the 'pain' if she feels that her future would be more secure if she made some 'sacrifices' now.
The decisions she makes are quite tough and at first, I thought she just wanted to make her life more unbearable but when the same predicament occurs, she still 'wisely' does the same thing and prevents any difficult situations to arise because of all her secrets.
Maureen Lee deftly navigates each storyline well and my only gripe is that the novel has too many characters, one has to list them in a notebook to make sure I'd remember who is who. This is an expansive novel with many characters - this is a family novel after all! Towards the end of the novel, I am faced with so many names, I have to slow down my reading a bit, so I can visualize who is who.
Maureen's female characters are quite unique because they make decisions which are not straightforward and not 'normal'. She also shows us a side of England right after World War II straight to the early 80s and how the Brits rebuilt their lives after the devastation of war.
No comments:
Post a Comment