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Alentejo Blue by: Monica Ali List Price: £7.99 City Travel Guides Price: £5.99 You Save: £2.00 (25%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Paperback EAN: 9780552771160 ISBN: 0552771163 Label: Black Swan Manufacturer: Black Swan Number Of Pages: 304 Publication Date: May 01, 2007 Publisher: Black Swan Studio: Black Swan Sales Rank: 201993 Related Items:
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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
 Rating:  - FragmentedOverall, a rather disappointing book, though the writing is quite good and there are particularly good passages/sections throughout. The trouble is that 'Alentejo Blue' is a fragmented novel with no real central narrative drive or plot to pull together the disparate strands. It reads like a collection of linked short stories set in the same Portuguese area. Each chapter focusses on a different character living or staying in Alentejo. Inevitably with any book of this kind, some characters are more interesting and easy to identify with than others. I found the first two sections particularly hard going and almost stopped reading, although some of the subsequent sections were better. I've never been to the area so ... Read More: Rating:  - How does she do it?This book is awesome. I'm a Brit living in Canada but have been intimately connected with the south of Portugal since the 60s. I can't begin to fathom how Monica Ali did it. She got into the minds, language, innuendo and naked emotion of the Alentejo to give us a refreshing, behind the scenes, look at this loveable parallel world. If you don't love this book it's because you just don't get it. Do yourself a favor and read it. It's everything that "facing reality" isn't. Rating: - Not sure if this is actually a novel...Alentejo Blue is certainly a work of fiction which runs for just shy of 300 pages - but that isn't enough to make a novel. It's really more like a collection of short stories all set in the same rural Portuguese village. There is occasionally some wonderful use of language in the description, but this fails to make up for the fact that it just doesn't hang together. I can't help feeling that it would have been a more absorbing and satisfying read if more time and attention had been given to fewer characters, rather than skimming the surface and risking stereoptype and characature in the process. Or perhaps the range of characters and perspectives would work if there were a strong plot driving there interactions, but ultimately this is a ... Read More: Rating:  - A worthy successorI have to admit I only bought this book because I loved Brick Lane so much. I have never been to Portugal so have no idea if these interlinked stories are representative of a way of life. However, I did enjoy it. This is a very different book to Brick Lane - rather than being drawn into a very tightly knit family - here we are given a brief but intense look at many different people all linked by the village they live in (or pass through). There is no logical conclusion to the stories we hear but the lack of a contrived ending only makes each story more believable. They are not written as separate short stories but Ali has shown that her writing skill could be used in this medium. A page turner but a very different experince to Brick Lane. Rating:  - Go and read something less boring insteadHaving loved Brick Lane I was very eager to read this but it was a huge disappointment - so much so that I don't normally write reviews for Amazon but I am compelled to say "save your money!" This book comes with a very big "So what?!" It reads like a random collection of short stories which are badly thought out, lacking in plot and with weak characters. There are character links between the stories but they are so shallow and predictable. Like most books I read, I could not wait to finish this book- but for all the wrong reasons - it is boring and I actually became desperate to get my teeth into something decent and revive my dying brain cells. As for the insight to the Alentejo region.... it feels like ... Read More: |
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