Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [0]
VIBRANTLY AS ITS FAMILY.
As she explores the myriad ways in which dreams get deferred and hopes revised, infusing the prosaic details of domestic life with honor, humor, and deep affection, it is Anne Tyler’s achievement to raise ordinariness to an art form.”
The Christian Science Monitor
“With her picture-perfect Baltimore world of scraped knees, lost jobs and even lifelong grief, Tyler has staked out a singular territory; it is not so much nobility or tear-blinking fortitude that keeps her characters moving but more often their goofy, thoroughly human essence.… Her depiction of Ian’s transformation is extraordinary.”
The Boston Globe
“The pleasure of reading Anne Tyler lies in listening to disparate people, watching out for the odd impressions that creep into the margins of their tales. Seen this way, the moral message of SAINT MAYBE oddly resembles a medieval tapestry.”
Time
“Tyler has the gift of keeping her characters in clear sight as they wax, wane and turn unexpected corners along the passage of time.”
Los Angeles Times
“STUNNING … WONDERFUL.”
The Seattle Times
“Tyler crafts a warmly beguiling tale that sometimes echoes such previous works as SEARCHING FOR CALEB, DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT and, especially, THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST.… Here again are life’s endearing misfits, occasionally suffering pangs of self-awareness. Here is that special blend of playfulness and poignancy, the oh-so-true dialogue, the specificity of detail and image.… Heart-wrenching.”
The Orlando Sentinel
“Engaging … SAINT MAYBE is a first-rate novel, told with quiet but fiercely heart-wrenching authority.… Tyler writes in an earnest, plainspoken prose, underscoring her choice to make story itself, rather than style, the means to fictional magic.”
New York Newsday
“A warm and generous novel … Each character in SAINT MAYBE has been fully rendered, fleshed out with a palpable interior life, and each has been fit, like a hand-sawed jigsaw-puzzle piece, into the matrix of family life.”
The New York Times
“A MASTERFUL ACCOMPLISHMENT
by any standard and a worthy addition to Ms. Tyler’s impressive body of work … SAINT MAYBE is a gentle, insightful rendering of a troubled family.… This novel won’t harm Ms. Tyler’s reputation as one of our finest prose stylists. Her special gifts are an unassuming but precise descriptive power, an unerring eye for detail and a graceful, unhurried style that conveys perfectly her generous and humane view of family life.”
Atlanta Journal & Constitution
“Tyler’s novels are always a pleasure to read, and with the decline of minimalist fiction writers, Tyler’s sympathetic and sentimental attic-of-family-secrets has the American family all to itself.”
The Detroit News
“Exquisitely crafted … SAINT MAYBE is classic Tyler: wry, offbeat and engaging, with sentences to die for.”
The Miami Herald
“Perfection.”
The Kirkus Reviews
“MAY WELL BE HER MOST
IMPORTANT WORK …
Finishing a Tyler novel is like waking from a dream-filled sleep.… She has a gift for drawing readers into her world. Her books are hard to put down.… SAINT MAYBE deals movingly with Ian’s self-loathing, his heroic sacrifices and, finally, with his redemption.… SAINT MAYBE is a joy to read.”
The Denver Post
“Wondrous … Every few years Anne Tyler brings out a novel and makes originality again something to appreciate. How fiction that is so modest and unself-conscious, so teeming with melancholic characters, can be so absolutely funny and dazzlingly memorable is, of course, a secret locked inside Tyler’s mild-mannered features, which peer out from her dust-jacket photographs.”
Kansas City Star
“Tyler does her usual marvelous job of creating odd and slightly crazy but lovable characters peculiarly suited to her blue-collar, Baltimore neighborhoods.… The wisdom behind all of Anne Tyler’s fiction is a loving acceptance of the peculiar but surprisingly predictable habits of individual humans, of all their inherent frailties and eccentricities.… Anne Tyler is a master at discovering these peculiarities