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A review by sjgrodsky
All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories by Edward P. Jones
Did not finish book.
4.0
I read the first two stories in this collection, but I am now thoroughly enmeshed in reading for the JCC book selection committee. I’m going to set this book aside, for right now anyway.
Honestly, I have a feeling I’m not going to get back to this book. The first two stories I read were wonderful in their way, but I read dutifully rather than breathlessly. The author is a wonderful prose stylist. On page 10, he beautifully captures the protagonists attitude in one sentence: “They were the children of once-upon-a-time slaves, born into a kind of freedom, but they had traveled down through the womb with what all of their kind had been born with — the knowledge that God had promised next week to everyone but themselves.”
But prose style isn’t enough. Jones begins the story with an attention-grabber: Ruth finds an abandoned baby in a tree. She takes him home, she raises the boy, she names him Miles, after her father-in-law.
Well, isn’t the story going to continue with the story of Ruth, and her jealous husband Aubrey, and Miles? That’s where I wanted to go. But then we wander off into the less-engaging story of blind Willie and his girlfriend Melinda, and we never get back to the story that originally grabbed me.
Critics have lauded the author and awarded him the Pulitzer Prize. But I feel frustrated and cheated and just want to know what happened to that teenage couple, Aubrey and Ruth, and their unplanned non-biological child.
Honestly, I have a feeling I’m not going to get back to this book. The first two stories I read were wonderful in their way, but I read dutifully rather than breathlessly. The author is a wonderful prose stylist. On page 10, he beautifully captures the protagonists attitude in one sentence: “They were the children of once-upon-a-time slaves, born into a kind of freedom, but they had traveled down through the womb with what all of their kind had been born with — the knowledge that God had promised next week to everyone but themselves.”
But prose style isn’t enough. Jones begins the story with an attention-grabber: Ruth finds an abandoned baby in a tree. She takes him home, she raises the boy, she names him Miles, after her father-in-law.
Well, isn’t the story going to continue with the story of Ruth, and her jealous husband Aubrey, and Miles? That’s where I wanted to go. But then we wander off into the less-engaging story of blind Willie and his girlfriend Melinda, and we never get back to the story that originally grabbed me.
Critics have lauded the author and awarded him the Pulitzer Prize. But I feel frustrated and cheated and just want to know what happened to that teenage couple, Aubrey and Ruth, and their unplanned non-biological child.