This book is a beast. I was defeated by it before I even began – over a thousand pages, most of it comprised of a single sentence – yep, I was fully intimidated. And then it was selected for my pool in the BookTube Prize (I suspected my luck would bring me that outcome and was doing my best to chip away at it before my reading began) so I had no choice. Lucky for me, the audiobook had finally come out just in time for me to use it. I found I could listen to this on 2.15x speed without missing anything since it’s largely stream of consciousness. It was the perfect companion as I toiled away about my housework and cooking – much as the protagonist does.
It took me a good while to feel my way into this book. It’s not going to be love at first sight for anyone. I was at least a quarter of the way through (or the length of your average novel) when I finally started to find my groove. I’ve heard many other reviewers say that once they got into it it was hypnotic, and I can definitely see why. It really does mesmerize you once you get into it, and you start to feel like you can get on with the protagonist.
I was fairly amazed by this book. Sure, it’s long. It’s heavy. It’s repetitive. But it’s also wide-ranging and covers a staggering range of issues and topics. One thing I loved about it is that it shows you what a rich internal life someone can have. Here’s an Ohio housewife who makes pies to make a few bucks for her family while caring for a house full of kids, missing her mother, and worrying about money. But as the book progresses you learn about her background and education, about the health issues she’s had and is still suffering from (one of them a back injury similar to my own, so I have no idea how she is able to keep up with what she does), the places she’s travelled to, the books she’s read and how much she mulls over major issues happening in the world. It’s easy to discount housewives. It’s easy to assume that our family is our whole world. But that’s not the case, and this book brilliantly demonstrates that fact. At one point she even mentions that there’s supposed to be a SARS-like epidemic in the near future – and here we are in a COVID-19 pandemic! Yes, she is paying attention.
The format is challenging, I’ll grant you that. But there is a story here. Once you get used to it (and I can’t recommend the audiobook highly enough) all the extra stuff like lists of ingredients in the things she’s baking and her thoughts on her chickens fades into the background and you can start to follow the threads of story woven into the words. And it’s an exciting plot as you get towards the end! The interspersed story of the mountain lion and her cubs also starts to make sense – and, weird as it was, I even liked it once I’d finished!
I can’t tell you this book won’t challenge you. It will, in more ways than one. But I do implore you to try it anyway if you have any interest at all in the idea of it. I found it repaid the effort I put into it tenfold, and I was really grateful that I was given the proper motivation to push on with it. It’s one I know I’ll still be thinking back to if I’m around years from now.
LATTICING one cherry pie after another, an Ohio housewife tries to bridge the gaps between reality and the torrent of meaningless info that is the United States of America. She worries about her children, her dead parents, African elephants, the bedroom rituals of “happy couples”, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and how to hatch an abandoned wood pigeon egg. Is there some trick to surviving survivalists? School shootings? Medical debts? Franks ’n’ beans?
A scorching indictment of America’s barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder—and a revolution in the novel.
It’s also very, very funny. – Goodreads
Book Title: Ducks, Newburyport
Author: Lucy Ellmann
Series: No
Edition: Paperback
Published By: Galley Beggar Press
Released: July 4, 2019
Genre: Fiction, Experimental, Family, Social Commentary
Pages: 1,030
Date Read: April 14-May 6, 2020
Rating: 9/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.01/5 (2,313 ratings)
Oh dear… sorry, but… this sounds horrid!