2024 the best movie recommendations review

Price: $16.95 - $15.24
(as of Dec 06, 2024 15:29:26 UTC - Details)

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

A “fiercely intelligent . . . daring, and very moving” about an English village haunted by one family’s loss—for readers of The Virgin Suicides and Zadie Smith’s NW (George Saunders, The Paris Review Daily).

Midwinter in an English village. A teenage girl has gone missing. Everyone is called upon to join the search. The villagers fan out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on what is usually a place of peace. Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed.

As the seasons unfold and the search for the missing girl goes on, there are those who leave the village and those who are pulled back; those who come together and those who break apart. There are births and deaths; secrets kept and exposed; livelihoods made and lost; small kindnesses and unanticipated betrayals. An extraordinary novel of cumulative power and grace, Reservoir 13 explores the rhythms of the natural world and the repeated human gift for violence, unfolding over thirteen years as the aftershocks of a tragedy refuse to subside.

“Jon McGregor has revolutionized that most hallowed of mystery plots: the one where some foul deed takes place in a tranquil English village that . . . doesn’t feel so tranquil anymore.” —The Wall Street Journal

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Catapult (October 3, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1936787709
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1936787708
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.52 x 0.76 x 8.25 inches
Reviewer: switterbug/Betsey Van Horn
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: One of the most exquisite novels I've ever read
Review: I think I just discovered a new (for me) favorite author. British author Jon McGregor is unconventional, to say the least, and not what you may expect. Sure, the beginning is as a page ripped from the headlines—a 13 year-old girl goes missing from a northern English village. “When last seen she’d been wearing a white hooded top with a navy-blue body warmer, black jeans and canvas shoes. She was five feet tall, with straight, dark blond, shoulder-length hair.” Subsequently, the novel leaves the genre crime thriller behind. It becomes one of the most transcendent novels I have ever read, gently illuminating a portrait of a town and its people in a style closer to Virginia Woolf with a Michael Ondaatje sensuality.RESERVOIR 13 marks the life cycle, the microcosmic ecosystem of people and nature juxtaposed and turning year after year, the quotidian hum observed as from an omniscient eagle flying over the landscape or skimming over the terrain. The author has impeccable control over his narrative, glancing freely from one inhabitant to another, pairing with nature. The bats hibernated, the foxes gave birth, pheasants lift their plumage, people die, the clocks move forward or back.There is no one protagonist and no specific plot. Instead, there are themes of repetition, of community life and its social interplay, the way we inhabit our space, even the way McGregor inhabits space on the page, repeating certain sentences throughout the novel, marking time as infinite. We note the undercurrent of male violence. We observe the way people and nature affirm the cycle of perpetuity, regardless of individual struggles and in the face of our intimacies, secrets, personal tragedies, betrayals, and eventual obscurity. The community endures.Rebecca Shaw is the missing girl, and the author keeps her in the consciousness of the reader and the villagers with ceaseless rhythms and repetition, echoing her name as the narrative advances. “The missing girl’s name was Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex.” There are 13 reservoirs, thirteen chapters, thirteen years. Every chapter save the first and last begins with, “At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks…”The crystalline prose is truly exquisite, and its beauty made me gasp. All events are equal, and often in the same paragraph, the natural world and the domestic one coexist equally. This may be the only book I’ve read where I felt that almost entirely using the passive voice worked so magnificently to create the right mood, atmosphere, and superb restraint.“In August the young bats moved away from their mothers’ milk and the nursery colonies broke up. Their networks of flight were complex and unseen. They flung themselves through the grazing meadows taking dung beetles and moths while the adults began finding mates. On the baking stone path beside Reservoir no. 5 a slowworm was basking, and was taken by a buzzard to feed her chicks. Richard and Cathy were seen having lunch again at the new organic pub in Harefield. Questions were asked as to why they felt it necessary to go that far. Inferences were drawn. The cricket was canceled for weather, and the Cardwell team didn’t come over for drinks as they had done in previous years. Su and Austin Cooper had their twentieth anniversary.”There isn’t a moral point to this story. The emphasis and our attentions aren’t focused on one episode or another. The missing girl doesn’t age as years go by, she was sealed at thirteen, as she alternately surfaces like the seasons or is buried in their minds behind the everyday continuation of village life, and the world keeps on turning.

Reviewer: Lydia Fazio Theys
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Maybe it was 3.5 stars because some of the writing was beautiful
Review: This book was dense and at time I was pretty well wrapped up in it. But, in the end, the style did not work for me. Whatever reader tricks I use to keep track of characters just didn't do it in a text that presented diary-like paragraphs about lots of people all run together, with no quotation marks and often not a clear feeling whose story a sentence belonged too. And maybe that was the idea. But in the end, I felt vaguely depressed, more like a voyeur than a reader. I am impressed with how much Jon McGregor did within those limitations. And maybe it's the times, and at a time when the world was not such a gray and dreary place, I would have felt better about this book. But it ended up bringing me down with not enough other value to make that worth it--although I'm not sure if I have expressed what I am trying to say very well!

Reviewer: MfromCO
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Mundane and repetitive -- but an interesting concept.
Review: I bought this book based on the Man Booker long list and a couple reviews. It sounded interesting. It is. Just not enough for me to read the whole thing. The mundane and repetitive nature of the book -- tho that's the point, probably -- just drove me to skip the middle 100 pages and read the first 75 and the last 30. It never changed. Just not my sort of book, tho I appreciate the concept and have never read anything like it before. Probably won't again, either.

Reviewer: Mary Lins
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: I've Never Read Anything Like This Before!
Review: “Reservoir 13” by Jon McGregor, won or was nominated for, a slew of awards in 2017. It was recommended to me by a friend who reliably knows what I will like; she wasn’t wrong!Thirteen year old Becky Shaw has disappeared from a small village in England. What happened to her? Do the other teens in the town know more than they are telling? Is one of the denizens of this quaint town responsible in some way?This is not an “easy read” as it is delivered in a matter-of-fact, quotidian detail, style consisting of almost entirely declarative sentences; almost no dialogue (and zero quotations marks or paragraph breaks). And the reader is plopped down in the middle of the town, so to speak, and there is some challenge to figuring out who the characters are and how they relate to each other. But gradually the reader adjusts to this style of storytelling and we come to care about the characters while we wonder, as the seasons and the years pass, if we will ever learn Becky’s fate.I've never ready anything like this before, and though it does take some adjusting to, it's worth the challenge. Normally I shy away from "experimental" novels, but this one is just so well done; I am in awe of McGregor's talent. You can't "skim" this novel; major action and clues are revealed in simple sentences. And you can't get too hung up on "what happened to Becky Shaw" because that's not really what the book is about. It's about the village and the people in it, and how they live their lives. I'm reminded of James Taylor's lyric: "The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time." I know that there is a "companion" novel called "The Reservoir Tapes" coming out next year and I look forward to reading more about these people.

Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 2.0 out of 5 stars
Title: There’s no there there
Review: I could not finish this. A girl goes missing at the outset. It happens in a small village in England. Everyone looks for her but she is not found. Village life goes on as before. Many people, identified only by name, dig their allotments, observe the weather, damage their marriages and wonder occasionally about the missing girl. Paragraphs go on for pages and many lyrical words are expended on describing the weather and the topography. That’s just about how it goes on, declarative sentence after declarative sentence, subject, verb, object and I just couldn’t take it anymore. No one to care about, not even the missing girl.

Reviewer: Nancy Drynan
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: A great read. Will read others by this author.

Reviewer: Ginger 53B
Rating: 1.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: There are only three books I have failed to complete reading in 50 plus years. This was the third!