Marine Life by Linda Svendsen

It's odd, I can't quite make up my mind what I thought of this book. The characters are dysfunctional and not terribly sympathetic. The book can't seem to decide whether it's a novel, or a series of short stories about the same characters, or maybe something else entirely - at any rate, the narrative is oddly disjointed, with events related in a detached way and out of chronological order. Adele, the narrator, reminisces about her childhood, growing up the youngest of four children in a working-class Vancouver family. A picture slowly emerges of the relationships she has with her siblings, her mother, her stepfather, her husband and her children. Nothing really seems to happen and even when it looks like something it about to, the story abruptly switches to something else, and the moment is lost. Even the last part of the book, which has hints about the darkness of Adele's sister Irene's seemingly happy family life, doesn't really go anywhere with the hints. I find books like this rather irritating - all these little ideas thrown together in a way that is obviously supposed to make you think and try to work out for yourself what you believe happened to the characters. The trouble is that I'm not sure I really care, but that I had to read this book in order to write an essay for an English class - it was either this or D. H. Lawrence, which I'm putting off as long as possible. :-P