The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Rating: 2/5 Stars

• Pub. Date: November 2009
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Format: Hardcover, 507pp
• ISBN: 0060852577
• Library Loan

Harrison Shepherd was born in the United States but spent his childhood in the 1930's in Mexico being raised by his mother. He spent his life writing journals of the world around him. These journal's were then turned into this "memoir". Some information was filled in by Shepherd's writing assistant and others by newspaper articles of events. Moving back and forth from Mexico to the United States Harrison Shepherd unveils the happenings in the world and the man that he becomes in the process. Along his travels he works with artists Diego Rivera and Frida Khalo and gets involved in political turmoil with Lev Trotsky.

I hate to say negative things about books because others may really like them but for me this book was a bit of a snooze fest. A lot of effort was put into this book to make it feel more like a memoir than fiction and it did, a little too much in fact. There were too many words in this book. This is my first Kingsolver book so I cannot compare it to others but she is VERY thorough. Sometimes that's good and sometimes that's not so good. In most instances in this novel I did not need many of the extra monotonous information.

I read this book for one of my book clubs and only finished it because I was using it for a travel game for Play Book Tag Bingo. I had already invested several days and had several cities to use for the game and couldn't turn back.

This book fits the following Categories/Challenges for me:

• Hogwarts Reading Challenge
• Monthly Mixer Mele Challenge
• New Authors Challenge