Anthony Marra  |  Fiction

2022, 416 pages

The story is about a young woman who emigrates from Italy to the US and, in 1941, is hired at Mercury Pictures.  It sounded interesting!  But I did not survive.

The average reading level of best-selling books, across genres, is 7th-grade.  While many novels (especially) are dumbed down to this level for a more general audience, and that irritates me, I guess I am also displeased when an author uses ridiculously flowery language to express a scene or event.  Here are three examples, looking only at pages 40, 41, and 42.

"Every family is a palimpsest and most days, in the kitchen, Mimi felt herself the half-effaced hardly legible text overwritten by the energetic bluster of her successors." (Pg 40). Even rereading this sentence multiple times, I still don't know what it says.

"It looked like the royal treasury of Atlantis had been dredged from the deep, given a fresh varnish, and relocated to downtown's gray-beige busyness."  (Pg 41). The royal treasury?

"Once she wandered into a speakeasy gents room and beheld in the wall-scrawled vulgarities the sense of expressive possibility Monet must have felt when he saw his first waterlily."  (Pg 42). Would one really actually sense this amidst the vulgarities?

One reviewer said it gets better at page 80.  Another reviewer argued for page 200.  Defying the "Pearl Rule of 50," I made it to page 100.  I am just not enjoying myself.

Did you read and like Mercury Pictures Presents?

March 2025