Take a photo of a barcode or cover
jennareadsbooks 's review for:
Fates and Furies
by Lauren Groff
Late to the Lauren Groff party but I finally read Fates and Furies and... her writing is undeniably beautiful.
Fates and Furies is about a marriage. It’s about Lotto, a spirited charming happy-go-lucky tall kid, and Mathilde, a mysterious quiet but beautiful also tall girl. Lotto comes from privilege in Florida, but his dad dies when he is still young and his mom becomes reclusive. Mathilde doesn’t have a family. When Lotto and Mathilde meet in their last couple weeks of college, they get married shortly after.
The book follows their ups and downs and trials and tribulations as they move to NYC, Lotto is cut off from his fortune, Lotto struggles to get acting gigs so Mathilde has to make ends meet, Lotto finds his gift and voice as a successful playwright, and Lotto never loses his charming innocence. Mathilde is sort of in the shadows for the first half of the book. As the story goes on, powerful secrets about what holds them together are slowly revealed.
What worked for me: the writing. The lyrical prose, the brilliance of her words. What didn’t work for me: the way the characters spoke to one another did not seem realistic. The book kind of felt like watching the characters from a murky distance. I didn’t feel the connection until very late in the book.
My favorite part was probably a description of an opera Lotto worked on about Antigone. This short vignette, and conversations with some of you, have made me super interested in Groff’s short fiction, which I hear is where she is the most skilled.
By the end of this book, I decided I really enjoyed it. It was sticking with me, I was thinking about it a lot, and I wanted to know more. I do like slightly pretentious writing in general. But that needing more, the weird distance between the reader and the characters, and the some slightly overwritten parts that made me say “for real” and feel like she was trying too hard held this back from being five stars for me. However, I will definitely return to Groff’s writing.
Let me know if you’ve read this and what you thought of it, or what you think of Groff’s other books!
Fates and Furies is about a marriage. It’s about Lotto, a spirited charming happy-go-lucky tall kid, and Mathilde, a mysterious quiet but beautiful also tall girl. Lotto comes from privilege in Florida, but his dad dies when he is still young and his mom becomes reclusive. Mathilde doesn’t have a family. When Lotto and Mathilde meet in their last couple weeks of college, they get married shortly after.
The book follows their ups and downs and trials and tribulations as they move to NYC, Lotto is cut off from his fortune, Lotto struggles to get acting gigs so Mathilde has to make ends meet, Lotto finds his gift and voice as a successful playwright, and Lotto never loses his charming innocence. Mathilde is sort of in the shadows for the first half of the book. As the story goes on, powerful secrets about what holds them together are slowly revealed.
What worked for me: the writing. The lyrical prose, the brilliance of her words. What didn’t work for me: the way the characters spoke to one another did not seem realistic. The book kind of felt like watching the characters from a murky distance. I didn’t feel the connection until very late in the book.
My favorite part was probably a description of an opera Lotto worked on about Antigone. This short vignette, and conversations with some of you, have made me super interested in Groff’s short fiction, which I hear is where she is the most skilled.
By the end of this book, I decided I really enjoyed it. It was sticking with me, I was thinking about it a lot, and I wanted to know more. I do like slightly pretentious writing in general. But that needing more, the weird distance between the reader and the characters, and the some slightly overwritten parts that made me say “for real” and feel like she was trying too hard held this back from being five stars for me. However, I will definitely return to Groff’s writing.
Let me know if you’ve read this and what you thought of it, or what you think of Groff’s other books!