The Amateur Marriage - Anne Tyler

Title: The Amateur Marriage Author: Anne Tyler Genre: Fiction Rating: 5/10 # pages: 306 Date read: July, 2008

Summary: Michael is a good boy from a Polish neighborhood in Baltimore; Pauline is a harum-scarum, bright-cheeked girl who blows into Michael's family's grocery store at the outset of World War II. She appears with a bloodied brow, supported by a gaggle of girlfriends. Michael patches her up, and neither of them are ever the same. Well, not the same as they were before, but pretty much the same as everyone else. After the war, they live over the shop with Michael's mother till they've saved enough to move to the suburbs. There they remain with their three children, until the onset of the sixties, when their eldest daughter runs away to San Francisco. Their marriage survives for a while, finally crumbling in the seventies.

Review: I read and loved Digging to America last year and therefore expected to enjoy this one just as much, or at least see the same charming characteristics of it. Instead I found it to be an extremely depressing book where one bad thing after the other seemed to happen to the main couple and they never had any kind of respite. It was very well written to be sure, but just left me in a blue funk. This is one of those that goes straight back on bookmooch.

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