Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I can appreciate understatement, nuance and metaphor, but this just seemed stifled. Everyone - nearly everyone - comes off as severely repressed, which does not jive at all with my love and understanding of my Long Island and Irish heritage. Granted no culture is monolithic, but Long Island is probably the last place I would set a story with high family drama experienced by characters who say pretty much nothing about it. It's as if the author had the cast of Downtown Abbey dumped on the South Shore with almost none of their wealth intact.

And the repression never rang true to any of the characters - instead of understanding their feelings and the society that kept them from expressing those feelings, they simply came off to me as frustratingly opaque. Yes, there is such a thing as the oppression of the middle class lid screwed tightly on suburbia that robs people of their ability to handle crisis, but the author didn't show or tell us anything about it. The result was a story that felt disjointed and characters who made little sense to me. I'm happy for those who found beauty in it, but I struggled every page of the way through.