Music For Torching

recommended! funny and interesting. definitely not the typical family, but all emotions presented by characters are very understandable and reasonable under the circumstances they are presented. it has those great moments everyone has been through but can't really find the words to describe.

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wonderfully written!

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Second femme to get a 5… and since I don’t want to make a habit of this the next time I decide to read a book authored by a femme… I’ma go with Martha Stewart...

Suburban ennui gone frantic which seems exaggerated but may not be and surely not an exaggeration of fantasy. It hardly seemed funny to me, but rather sad, pitiable, and almost understandable. Feeling themselves in a prison, they're flailing away with so much energy that there's none left to open

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the door.

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Great book. Clips along well and has an ending I did NOT see coming! Very thought provoking. I highly recommend this for both its bizarre humor and its depth.

I have read enough A M Homes novels to know how they are likely to go. A lot of frenetic madcappery, and the sort of inhibition shedding that makes you feel quite giddy, but also a tendency to go into lengthy lulls where not a lot happens. This had a lot of lulls, and consequently it was my least

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favourite by her to date.

The setup here is that middle aged married couple Paul and Elaine are having a sort of joint middle aged crisis so they accidentally on purpose burn their house down (like you do). Except they don't raze it to the ground, it's still there but it needs patching up (cue eccentric insurance agents, builders etc). What I did like was the bit where they were forced to stay with their friends in their perfect house and witness the wife's perfect housekeeping. That rang true all the way. What didn't quite ring true is the way nearly burning the house down is the gateway to all sorts of life-changing/life-enriching situations - discovering lesbians in the closet and quasi life coaches on the daily commute. Surely they were already there whether the house got burned down or not?

Just when it seems the book is settling down to the sort of conclusion where everyone has discovered some new meaning in life and hope for the future and wasn't-it-a-good-idea-to-commit-arson etc (I unashamedly speed-read the last hundred or so pages), the author throws all the cards back up in the air with a dramatic grand finale not dissimilar to the device used in "This Book will Save Your Life". It left me puzzled - was everything we read up to that point of no consequence? If I'm honest, I didn't get it.

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Homes writes despair REALLY well. My dearest Meghan gave this to me almost two years ago, and I couldn't read it for this very reason. Coming back to it now, I can handle it a whole lot better. It's about a relationship gone rotten and how we always think we have it the worst when that's generally

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not really the case. This book is darkly funny in even the worst moments and a quick read, too--it's mostly dialogue. I loved how, for a 358 page book, the action of the story evolved in maybe a week-and-a-half tops and the events were totally human and utterly surreal at the same time. Excuse me while I recoup....

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If you've read The Safety of Objects, this is a must read. If you haven't, this is still a highly recommended book. It's equally strange and familiar characters are beautifully drawn, and the situations, no matter how odd, feel as intense as a disaster and a family Thanksgiving dinner all rolled

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into one.

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