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Can't Bring Myself to Finish this Book

Customer Rating:
As a member of Amazon's Vine Program, I was happy to see this book listed among the choices of titles months ago since I had read advanced reviews and articles on this book and had actually wanted to read it. All I can say, is thank goodness I didn't have to pay for this book.

I have tried several times to pick it up and start reading it. I finally was able to do so over the holidays and about 1/3 of the way into it, I can't even motivate myself to finish it (which I rarely ever do!).

This book is so boring. There's little to no character development. The story is "supposed" to be told in alternating voices between the sisters, which is usually a plot device I really like (when done well, it can make a "good" book "extraordinary"!). Here, I can't even tell at times who's telling the story! There's so many references to "she" and "her" -- Who's talking?? As for plot line or advancement of the story, there's none. This is more or less a character study. And it's just so boring!

Sorry, can't recommend this book.

An Exquisite But Seriously Flawed Gem

Customer Rating:
"I See You Everywhere," the latest novel by Julia Glass, is a seriously flawed gem that will probably be appreciated best by those who are already ardent fans of the author's writing. Like her other two books, this novel is an exquisitely crafted reproduction of real life. In this case, the work is a meditative character study of two sisters and their evolving relationship over twenty-five years. The characterizations are outstanding, the prose lovely--at times even breathtaking--but what the book lacks is an overarching plot and tension within that plot.

Although I am an enthusiastic fan of Julia Glass' works, it took me four months and three separate tries to work up the interest to finish this book. Only on the third try did I discover the key to keeping my interest aroused enough to complete it. For me, the secret was giving up trying to find a consistent thread of a plot. Instead, I just settled down to enjoy the author's prose on a page-by-page basis, expecting nothing from the plot as a whole. At that point, the work really started to blossom and delight me. I took great pleasure in each image and fictional real-life situation that the author created for me to visualize and experience. I started getting interested in understanding each of the two sisters and analyzing their ever-changing relationship. Indeed, I rediscovered how much I love Glass' writing: she has such an extraordinary ability to create reality with words!

Of course by the time I finished the novel, I realized that there was, after all, a consistent thread that held the whole together. But that thread was ultimately too thin and bore no tension from beginning to end.

Glass loves building each of her novels with a definite physical structure.

"Three Junes" was a detailed character study of one unique character built on the structure of a triptych. This three-part structure was vital to the success of the whole. Each part could have stood on its own as a separate novella, but together the parts symbiotically created a far greater work allowing the reader to view the main character from three different perspectives.

"The Whole World Over" was a thematic study of family and read like a collection of interlocking short stories. Its structure was a complicated three-dimensional Venn diagram. Its emphasis was fully on the theme of family, and thus it was groups of overlapping and intertwining families, and not individual characters, that Glass was trying to develop.

With "I See You Everywhere," the structure is a double helix. The double-twining structure is repeated throughout the work, most noticeably in the narration of two separate first person voices--one for each of the two sisters. The structure is inventive, but Glass fails to make this motif live up to its possibilities. The whole double first person narration and intertwining lives seems forced and artificial...Glass never quite pulls off the experiment. Throughout the reading experience, the architecture of the novel is always too apparent and detracts from the rich reality of the prose.

If you are a fan of Julia Glass, by all means, read this book. There is great reward to be found in appreciating her prose and getting to know, appreciate, and understand the two main characters. But if you have never read any work by Glass, then I strongly urge you to read "Three Junes" first. That is by far her best work and is where you should begin.

There's a Lot We Don't See, Unfortunately

Customer Rating:
One interesting side effect of joining Vine is the number of books I've read so far outside my literary comfort zone; there aren't many books by authors I recognize so I end up trying out novels that *sound* interesting. It keeps turning out that the story wasn't what I expected. That's the case again here. _I See You Everywhere_ sounded like an intricate family story--it is about family, and intricate is arguable, but warmth and affection were largely missing. People who don't want to be depressed should read at their own risk.

The book follows two disparit sisters across twenty-five years. Except for the first each chapter has one protagonist, either the reasonably responsible, determinedly steady Louisa or flighty, fly-by-night Clem, and Julia Glass made each woman sympathetic enough that I could appreciate their differences in viewpoint. When I read Louisa's chapters I didn't like Clem. When I read Clem's I was more tolerant of her foibles, but less fond of Louisa's. That's probably how it's supposed to be and makes a very sketchy story far more complex, if no less full of holes.

A peek at the copyright page tells me all but the first and last chapters were published previously as separate short stories, and unfortunately that shows very clearly--dribs of information get repeated needlessly, there isn't nearly enough connecting material to leave the book with any *plot* of which to speak. You get a slice of one sister's life or the other, then you hop forward two years, five years, and there's another slice, with most of the good stuff happening off-camera and barely discussed. I thought the sisters weren't entirely consistent. Through the middle chapters, yes, mostly, but the first and last do stick out; one presumes they were written more at the same time, as bookends, and they connect better than anything else in the book. My first impression of Louisa and Clem didn't ring true again until that final section. Lots of loose threads get left lying around. For example, I would've liked to see Louisa's reaction to finding out where that brooch had gone after she made such a fuss over it... but it's never mentioned again. Aunt Lucy is barely mentioned again. Maybe that's true to life but it's unsatisfactory storytelling.

I'm not unhappy about how it ended, but the mood throughout was a dark rainy grey, and that never changes.

What's interesting is that although the meat of the book taking place where we don't see it left me feeling a little cheated, I sped right through _I See You Everywhere_ and enjoyed the trip. I *like* Louisa. Clem made me think. Their pain moved me, their separate stories reminded me of the uneasy messiness of real lives in a world that doesn't often treat us as we'd wish. Glass surprised me with twists I didn't expect at all and neither sister ever became predictable. It's a fine book for those who enjoy thorny family drama and don't mind the somewhat incomplete nature of it; I expect I'll read it again, in time.

The ties that don't bind.

Customer Rating:
Two sisters, one mother, one favorite and a lot of mutual resentment. This is indeed the stuff of many novels, most not nearly so good at capturing the glancing hits and misses of the adult sister relationship.

Clem is younger, fierce, in tune with animals (like her dog breeding mother) and sexually magnetic. She's also completely unmoored and incapable of meaningful attachment to men. Louisa is careful, resentful, far more successful but unable to percieve herself that way because in her own mind, she's always coming up short in comparison to her earthy, scarred survivor of a sister.

Glass wanders a little in here. The alternating first person narration sometimes left me waiting for three or four paragraphs (who is it now?) but then I caught on. There are sections that got tiresome to me as a reader. But the overall portrait of the power and limitation of the bond between sisters is deep. Also, the mother is a fabulous character, hilarious and stubborn and really unusual, and reading her is worth the book alone.

No one knows you like your sister, and no one hates you quite as much as your older sister, once you've displaced her. Your lives are a complex dance of what you will and won't say. You can feel the reactions to all your words, and you aim so carefully. When it's all over, you're left with enormous love and regret and the bone-deep understanding that none of the injustice mattered nearly as much as you thought it did at the time. This book captures that.

An affecting story.

Customer Rating:
This is an affecting novel. It returns to some of Glass's themes in her National Book Award winning Three Junes: art; fascination with animals in the wild; loneliness; mortality and extinction. Glass's vibrant, assured use of language gives a powerful depth to her two central characters, two sisters, as she speaks in each of their voices, alternating between them over two decades. Their parents and partners are also vividly drawn. I felt the novel succeeded for the most part, but not entirely, in giving enough plausible psychological context for the conundrum it presents. It left me pondering, in any case, after I had finished it, wondering about the characters as if they were people I had known.