2.5 stars. I picked this up after hearing someone gushing about Elizabeth McCracken’s writing, saying it was amazing and that I needed to read her right away, she’s a national treasure, yada yada yada. So when her new book came up in my library queue, I jumped in. Maybe I should have started with a different book of hers because I really struggled with Bowlaway.
It’s bad bad bad when a 384 page books feels a million pages long. I loved the first 1/4 and last 1/4, but that middle section was such an incredible slog. The narrative switches point of view characters throughout and the men it followed in the middle were so fucking boring/annoying. You can’t just start out your novel with an amazing character like Bertha Truitt, who just appears in Salford one day with no history and starts a bowling alley that becomes the social center of the town, and then saddle us with obnoxious man babies for the next 150 pages. Lord have mercy. I even generally like reading about unlikeable characters as long as the plot moves, but unfortunately that didn’t happen here.
McCracken can sure write a sentence though! I’ll give her that, credit where credit is due. Even when I was dying of disinterest and loathing, I still could appreciate her crackling writing skills. I’d be open to reading another of her books, I just have to do some serious research before I pick one to make sure it’s going to jive with my preferences.
