Reviews for House Lights

The average rating for House Lights based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-08-18 00:00:00 Paul Truman While in some ways the execution was disappointing and warranted three strars, I ejoyed this book a lot and don't want to be overly harsh. This is a well crafted and beautifully woven story of an only child, Beatrice, whose parents - both therapists - create a small world for her that is filled with symphonies, gourmet dinners and a sense of elitism. She grows up believing in the image of her superior parents and eventually decides to become an actress, thus making contact with her actress grandmother whom her mother has been estranged from for years. Around this time Beatrice discovers that her father has been accused of sexual misconduct with his patients and this sets her world into a talespin. She struggles with having the image of her parents sullied, and, in a nice parallel, ends up harboring similar anger to her parents as her mother did to hers. Cohen's sentences are beautiful, and I enjoyed reading just about every page of this. However, it troubled me that there was no sense of time (this is told in flashback and yet there is little detail to help me understand time passing), that for all that Beatrice thought to eloquently, her dialogue never revealed this to be true, and that she had no real depth of character on her own, outside of narrative. It was hard to root for her, to get to know her, to understand who she was, as much as she was a pawn in an intellectual discourse. The parents were a little better sketched, but as it wasn't their story, that didn't really help the issue. At times Cohen seemed more in love with her prose than with her characters or their story, and that created distance for me which made for a less satisfactory read. Overall, however, I would recommend it for its strengths which I feel outweigh the weaknesses.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-12-31 00:00:00 Alfreda Wong I can't say that this one was quite as "tantalizing... captivating... provocative" as Booklist promotes. It took nearly 150 pages to really get into this novel and the whiny tone of the 20 year old protagonist almost left me considering quitting mid-passage, except that I was stuck in a series of airports, attempting to make my way west in a snowstorm (fun, eh?). Because this book "loosely" fits a play structure, the author attempts "acts" as formatting, but I found myself longing for a chapter break and disappointed that the final scene occurs 20 years into the future with a large gap of time left untouched, and when we do resume the story, Beatrice's mother dies in a car crash, leaving many matters unresolved. Choppy would best describe this novel's structure and though I found a few phrases well delivered, I was left disappointed. I had read Cohen's nonfiction work in the mid-1990s during some research efforts into special education needs in the classroom (Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World). Perhaps more informative efforts or pure non-fiction are a better fit for her writing style? Too bad this one didn't quite satisfy my travel/leisure reading time.