This was required reading at some point in school, and I really liked it back then. More so now, I think, with some years on me. I read something recently that had a quote that went something like, it is always easy to forgive other peoples’ parents. Very clever that, between all the characters in the book, this is augmented.

Many explain why their mothers behave as they do in, I think, humanizing ways. The audiobook makes a good pairing with this because the narrator is great with changing her voice for each character. When there’s some broken English I actually find it more comfortable hearing it from a narrator too, then self-generated, which feels a bit stereotypical, feeding into defaultism.

I thought each story dovetailed very well into the other and I had seen the movie maybe a year or two ago, and was very curious about the interiority of the characters, which is what this book is predominantly concerned with. In some ways, not much happens in a few. But that access to them always made it feel compelling to me. Great adaptations of source material, I think, should be like that this: companion pieces to one another - feeding into the strength of the particular medium.

Almost a 5 star read, maybe I’ll bump it up if I continue to think about it. It’s difficult for a story you’ve read and viewed before to supply me with the X factor I typically give 5 star reads.