The Back Porch Reader has flown the coop to soak up some tropic sun.
I’ll be back soon with new book reviews and recommendations. In the meantime, please enjoy this favorite selected from my GoodReads archives.
~Katie

Blurb:

People come as well as go.

Twelve years ago, Edwin Tully came to Oxford and fell in love with a boy named Marius. He was brilliant. An artist. It was going to be forever.

Two years ago, it ended.

Now Edwin lives alone in the house they used to share. He tends to damaged books and faded memories, trying to a build a future from the fragments of the past.

Then the weather turns, and the river spills into Edwin’s quiet world, bringing with it Adam Dacre from the Environment Agency. An unlikely knight, this stranger with roughened hands and worn wellingtons, but he offers Edwin the hope of something he thought he would never have again.

As the two men grow closer in their struggle against the rising waters, Edwin learns he can’t protect himself from everything—and sometimes he doesn’t need to try

Stats:

Rating:     ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Ratings are 1 to 5 stars and based mostly on GoodReads standards.
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Review:

This review originally posted on GoodReads July 7, 2015

I read this rabidly, so I was definitely engaged. But I wanted it to be more. I don’t often read novellas because it’s typically the case that I need more for it to feel like a complete story.

Same here…I wish this had been a full-length novel so we could have seen the relationship develop further, at a slower pace. This was a little too insta-love for me.

I didn’t feel like I got to know much about Adam to get what he really saw in Edwin. I think I liked Adam but was never fully convinced why I should other than how he wanted to hear everything and anything Edwin had to say. And I have a weakness for redheads.

Edwin was just so much in his head, and still recovering from a two-year-old breakup that he wasn’t quite ready to start something new. Until he suddenly was.

I wish this hadn’t all centered around the natural disaster but had rather been the jumping off point, or meet-cute.

And it ended before we got to the good stuff.

So, yeah, I needed more.

Purplish prose? Yeah…maybe. But, it worked for me. Because it was first person narrative. Because the narrator/MC has a stutter. Because he’s so self-conscious, his inner voice is such a contradiction to his outer voice. I loved his fascination with etymology and the aesthetics of words, how they flow, pop, get caught in the throat. It all kind of fascinates me too.

I love Hall’s writing style. And while this wasn’t quite the slam dunk as Glitterland, I still really liked it.