Will I love Ducks, Newburyport?

I was daunted by this book - 1,000 pages of one Ohio housewife's internal monologue, written as a single sentence (apart from a few pages of subplot about a mother cougar), it's not exactly a beach read. But once I took the plunge, and learnt to let the stream of consciousness wash over me, I became utterly immersed. Beneath the stylistic innovation, there's a surprisingly satisfying plot. It's also laugh-out-loud funny at times. It's not a book I'd recommend to all my friends - but I'd want to be friends with anyone who loved it as much as I did.

Entering this marvelous novel is like entering a luxury train and sitting down for a long, wild, and highly entertaining adventure. Yes, it is a very long novel, and yes, it is composed of a single sentence, but once I started reading, none of that mattered—I was ecstatically along for the ride.

What I love most about this novel is that we fully enter the thoughts and feelings of the middle-aged mother protagonist in a stream of consciousness, and she is, quite frankly, all of us with our neuroses, observations, frustrations, and loves. Incredibly, there is a definite form to… show more.

I loved this odd and audacious book, which is written in a single stream-of-consciousness sentence over a thousand pages long and follows a mother's struggles with economic duress, raising a daughter, running a small baking business, and dealing with a major flood.

There is a parallel story involving a mother mountain lion searching for her lost cubs that periodically interrupts the main narrative. I loved the interjections of the narrator’s humorous views of the life around her, and I admired the subtle ways the author wove the two stories together so they enhanced each other. I enjoyed it so much… show more.