Commonwealth

By: Ann Patchett

Narrated by: Hope Davis

The acclaimed, bestselling author—winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize—tells the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families’ lives.

One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.

Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them.

When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.

Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together.

Soap opera with less drama

I'm rating this book a 4 start but feel it may be closer to a 3 for me. The writing is excellent, so well written that the story entraps you like a web. The problem for me was that the web was getting too long and drawn out. However, I loved the book within a book feel and the jumping around in time was done perfectly. I never got lost. The downside is that I'm not sure what this book is about. It's about how events (good and bad) change life's course but is where you end up that terrible after all? I wonder if the title is more than just the setting. And most important, I'll spend the next few days pondering the ending. In summary, it's a great book but at times a little slow and left me a bit unsettled. Maybe it is a 4+ rating after all of the above. Book club material without hesitation.

PS - The narration was superb.

Great story

loved it will roecommend to my daughter. understand this was on bygones best seller list

Decent, nothing exceptional

The plot is decent, but it jumps around enough (both in the timeline and between characters) that it's hard to really get to know any one character in the book. It kind of jumps between the 6 kids and over 50ish years, so you end up just getting little pieces of them all at different ages. It would work ok if the kids all stayed close throughout their lives, but it doesn't seem like any of them do, so you're pretty much trying to follow 6 vaguely related people over the course of their lifetimes without really getting to know any of them.

The performance is also just okay. Hope Davis does an ok job for most of it, but all of her voices for the female characters sounded either painfully airy or like a shrill old woman with a cracking voice. It kind of made it hard for me to listen to.

Couldn't get into the narrator

Is there anything you would change about this book?

I simply didn't like the voices the narrator decided to assign to each character. The women sounded dumb and blonde; every single one of them. I kept waiting for something to really happen, and I can't say I get it.

Great narrator but didn't finish

The author is a wonderful writer and the characters are well developed but there isn't enough story to keep me interested. I didn't finish the book. it's kind of dreary, but the narrator is terrific.