The Glass Lake by Maeve Binchy

My first experience with Binchy, The Lilac Bus, didn't really thrill me.  So it was with trepidation that I started this book.  But it completely redeemed Binchy for me; I really enjoyed it.

Kit has a strange family dynamic.  Her father the pharmacist is content to sleep in a different room from her mother.  And her mother, well she's a wild spirit that wanders around the lake at odd times.  Until one day she wanders and doesn't come back, and a boat shows up capsized.    But Kit's mother has another secret.  One that just grows harder to keep with age and could have the whole small town reeling if it was ever found out.  And it is amidst this that Kit has to grow up and find her own place in the world, despite everyone's expectations of her.

I actually found Kit to be a secondary character to her mother Lena.  She just wasn't written as strongly.  She's likable though and definitely has strong thoughts on everything and seemingly knows what she wants.  Which is admirable.  She doesn't ever back down.  Lena is actually a little weaker in that regard.  She is able to be pushed around by the men in her life despite being strong in all other aspects.  But she's kind and even if I initially didn't like her, you have to admire her resilience.  There's a whole cast of secondary characters too and they each have their own stories.  I do feel that some of them were unresolved but they added a little something to the story whenever they were introduced.

This was a long ongoing story.  At times it was even tedious and slow moving.  But it was interesting for the most part and I like how Binchy showed that even life in a small town can be complicated.  And all of it felt real, like something that could happen in real life.  She had you cursing at the characters for some things and loving them for others.  And there wasn't too much jargon or anything to make it hard for people not familiar with the culture to understand what was going on.  Maybe a mention of "chips" now and then, but that seemed to be it.  Overall, it was well written and just felt authentic.

I won't write off Binchy now after this book.  It was a definite improvement over the other that I had read and I hope the rest turn out to be just as good.

The Glass Lake
Copyright 1995
757 pages

The Lilac Bus by Maeve Binchy

I think I may have missed something. I've heard a lot about Binchy and that her books are fabulous, etc. But this was my first time reading something of hers, and I have to say, I'm not really impressed.

The Lilac Bus is a series of short stories that are all somewhat related in a way, but individual stories all the same. They involve a bus load of people that are driven from Dublin to their hometown on the weekend. In the hometown they all have their little secrets and things they're trying to cope with. The latter part of the book though deals with some other people who are living in Dublin and have issues all their own. I wish I could write a better description, but really, that's what the book is about.

Since we only get to see these people for limited amounts of time (even if they do appear in each other's stories) there is no real connection here. The first story was about a miserly girl who is finally told off for being miserly. There is a woman dealing with her drunken mother, another dealing with her drunken husband. A man who doesn't connect with his parents and can't tell them about his secret. And so forth. Everyone in this book has some kind of problem.

Yet all these problems are unresolved. For the people on the Lilac bus we only hear about their lives for the space of a weekend. The latter part of the book the stories encompass more time, but still have no resolution. It's very annoying and unsatisfying and to make it even worse, it's exceptionally depressing. There are only a few stories that ended with an upbeat note, and even then it wasn't so much upbeat as it was just average living. None of the stories are ever followed up on either so we don't know what happens. If I wanted to read unfinished stories, I would have just went to the file of documents I have on my own computer. I like to have a finish to my stories. But still, I'm giving this book at least two stars because Binchy's writing style is nice and clear and had she finished her stories, I expect they would have been good. It was the only redeeming feature of this book.

Not for me, and even though I have a couple of other books by Binchy sitting on my shelf, I may hold off on reading them as a result of having read this book.

The Lilac Bus
Copyright 1982
390 pages