pickI liked this. Each chapter offered a perspective from one of the female inhabitants and we got to see how they interact, what they think and how they feel.
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Arlington Park | 
pickI liked this. Each chapter offered a perspective from one of the female inhabitants and we got to see how they interact, what they think and how they feel.
Started this one first thing... the cover is such a pretty wallpaper then the sinister bird...
pickAt a time when, like so many, I struggle to focus I read this in 24hrs. It could be a descendant of Mrs Dalloway. A handful of largely isolated women share a common feeling that marriage and motherhood have trapped and are draining the life out of them. They converge, with their husbands, on a dinner party hosted by one of them. It is sharp and bleak and skewers middle class family life but without malice towards the women themselves. I loved it!
pickThis is less a novel than a series of interconnected episodes or brief sketches of a procession of 30-something women narrated over the course of a single day and set in the eponymous suburb. Nothing much happens and yet the writing is wonderfully descriptive and we are somehow made to care about these women who seem to have it all and yet are trapped in their roles of wives and mothers as firmly as any nineteenth century woman.
pickAn absolutely scathing look at middle class motherhood.
Before we left for Saturna Island I was telling my husband about this book I‘d read when our oldest was a newborn and saying it‘s the book I wanted to bring away with us but I‘d given away our copy. Not an hour later I found a copy in the book sale at work - a discard from Saturna Library no less
pickGlimpses into the lives of young British mothers over the course of a day, with their anxieties & vague despair simmering beneath the surface of suburban contentment, culminating in a drunken dinner party. Characters so vivid I expect to bump into them at the supermarket (but not that I'd want to). Cusk's writing style makes this novel shine: funny, fierce, piercing, unsentimental, supple and disturbing. #Audiobook narrated by Jilly Bond.
Christine didn't see how she was supposed to know if the chicken was done. She had given it a good innings. It was as roasted as the contents of a charter flight home from Tenerife. "Oh, I don't know," she said, slamming it back into the oven for another precautionary blast.
In one month's time she would have another baby. She thought perhaps she had changed her mind and would not be needing it now.
Synchronicity: Amanda in Arlington Park has such a fear of messiness, she won't allow her son to play in their back garden unless it is perfectly dry & sunny outside. On the opening page of Down Among the Sticks and Bones, we meet the Wolcotts, who "are not the parenting kind." "Children were messes walking. They were trampled petunias & baseballs through picture windows & they had no place in the carefully ordered world the Walcotts inhabited."
panI loved Cusk's novel Outline, so I thought I'd go back and read one of her previous titles. I'm glad I read it, because I like to see her development, but she definitely landed on something unique and special in her later work.
I liked Outline so much I decided to go back and read one of Cusk's older titles.
Summed up, this book is basically about people married to spouses they hate.
panThis book pretty much bored me. A couple of the characters were somewhat interesting (Solly, Juliet) but for the most part there wasn't much follow thru with any of them. The ladies were all to go to the same dinner party at the end of the day and I kept hoping something would happen to make me "get it". Nope. It wasn't for me, but I did finish it anyway.
Surprised that there are no reviews, blurbs or quotes from Arlington Park so far. I guess I'll have to be the first 👍🏻
