Lately I've been using all of my free time to clean and organize closets and drawers throughout my house, which hasn't left me much time for reading. Winter I believe is the perfect time to organize spaces that have been forgotten about due to busy schedules. It's amazing how much stuff accumulates in a matter of years! But now that I have two closets organized, I'm taking a break to get back to my winter reading.
I started Alice Mcdermott's book, Someone a while ago-but at first I just couldn't seem to get interested in the narrator Marie, who tells the story of her life growing up in an Irish-American neighborhood in early-mid 20th Century Brooklyn. The characters in Marie's family and neighborhood although ordinary people, seem to have more than their share of heartache. What enticed me as a reader is her eye for details, descriptive writing and the resilience that the characters have through loneliness and loss. She captures the between wars era so well; stickball and skipping rope, and countless days spent sitting on apartment stoops watching the day unfold. The story begins with a young neighborhood girl- older than Marie, who jokes about her fall in the subway on her way home from work and can't seem to understand why she is always so unsteady on her feet. She quickly remarks that there is always someone there to help her up. Her untimely demise comes in the early part of the book, which sets the tone for the way things are going to happen going forward. This is not only a story of life's loneliness and despair although there is a good amount of it throughout the story, but one of faith, hope and and the continual will to love.
