Reviews for Nora, Nora

The average rating for Nora, Nora based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-05-15 00:00:00 Bhakti Dave Sometimes I think my taste for reading is fading, until I read a book and wind up liking it, which renews my hope and reminds me I'm probably just reading the wrong books. Siddons writes in the believable style of a precocious 12-year-old girl, so I could get inside Peyton's head. Her character is vividly drawn as the quiet, timid yet stubborn girl who obstinately identifies as a misfit, refusing her obnoxiously feminine aunt's attempts to make her into a "lady." Peyton warms to the newcomer with un-Southern ways, who is utterly unlike Peyton except that they both are uninterested in letting other people tell them what to do. This book did not strike me as sticking to a blueprint. I was worried for a while that Nora, as a Blithe Spirit, would turn into an infallible, Christ-like figure, but Siddons found the right combination of making her a free-wheeling revolutionary and flawed. Peyton herself was a demonstration that female characters do not need to be outspoken or scrappy to be complex and independent. (That's one thing that bothers me about relatively recent media: it's assumed that girls and women have to be highly opinionated and unafraid to get in fights, if they're going to be liberated. Otherwise, they're self-loathing victims of internalized misogyny. This is what Aunt Augusta can't understand, and what the formulaic Strong Women are supposed to show: there's more than one way to be a woman.) Some reviewers have said she was annoyingly insecure, but that's the point - she IS that way in the beginning. A major portion of the book deals with her learning to gain confidence as she sheds her old identity and perception of herself. Peyton's described as a favorite target of school bullies, but I wish there had been specific scenes about this told from her point of view. It would have helped to give perspective on her unhappiness at school, as well as why she has so little self-respect at the novel's beginning. School is a huge part of kids' lives in the first place, and its impact on Peyton made Siddons' largely excluding it from the narrative even more frustrating. I was a little disappointed with the ending, because given the blurb, I had expected a shattering conclusion. Now that I think about it though, looking at everything that came before it, it might be less necessarily upbeat than appeared at first. Which makes me feel better about it, oddly. Nora, Nora isn't my new shelf resident, but it's a touching coming-of-age novel addressing adolescent insecurity and isolation, role models, growing out of childhood attachments, and forging an identity. I heard Anne Rivers Siddons was a classic writer, so I'm glad to have been introduced to her, and hope to enjoy another of her books as much in the future. COMMENT FOR THOSE WHO HAVE FINISHED IT: * * * * * * * * * Nora as a person is so hard to hold on to that I wonder if Peyton's and her father's quest to make her a part of their lives again isn't a lost cause. If she wouldn't even stay in Cuba for her son and the man she loved, why would she give up her itinerant lifestyle for people she just met a year or so ago? Peyton said at one point that even though loving people means you will lose them eventually, you do it anyway because there isn't anything else. I wonder if Siddons meant to say not that Nora would settle down with them for good (as I thought at first), but that although there is a good chance they will lose her again, they will take the risk because not trying at all would be worse. It always pleases me when there is more than one way to interpret something. :)

Review # 2 was written on 2014-01-25 00:00:00 Alex Markman After a very slow start and an annoying, negative child the book finally starts going about 150 pages in. If you can stay the course it's not a bad book. I think the whole book boils down to if you expect too much of others you will always be disappointed.