Someone by Alice McDermott was given to me as a Christmas gift but I purposely set it aside because I knew that I wanted to savor every word of this novel. I knew it was going to be special and I was right.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading McDermott’s award-winning book, Charming Billy, and so I was familiar with McDermott’s incredible gift of creating characters that you feel you know, sentences that make you stop and go back and reread them several times and her mastery of quietly leading you into her magical stories.
Someone is set in Brooklyn in the 1940’s and we are immediately introduced to the book’s main character, Marie Commeford. Many of the reviews for Someone said that this is a novel about an ordinary life, an unremarkable life. I don’t agree for I don’t believe than anyone’s life is ordinary. The fact that McDermott sensitively writes of Marie’s life and how it unfolds tells me it is a life worth examining.
Marie is a healer and the heart and soul of Someone. This extraordinary book is truly about the essential but complex relationships that we form at different stages of our lives: the friends we make as children, the people we fall in love with and may marry, the people who treat our hearts shabbily; the children we may give birth to and lovingly raise, the give and take of trying to be a parent, the unbreakable bond you develop with a sibling, and the death of a loved one.
McDermott reveals to us in her lyrical way of writing that it’s the details of these milestones that make them extraordinary events even though others may consider or interpret them to be every day ordinary events.
Author Alice McDermott, winner of the 1998 National Book Award
As you can tell I loved this book! I did not want it to end!
Even now, many weeks after I finished reading it, I have gone back innumerable times and reread the many pages where I had folded down the corners because I wanted to remind myself of the way that McDermott created certain scenes or dialogue that she brilliantly nailed and those parts of the book have continued to stay with me.
I cannot recommend this book enough. I sincerely hope you like this book as much as I did!
Let me know what you think!!
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