Vinegar Girlby Anne Tyler
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9780804141260
Publication Date: June 21, 2016
Pages: 237
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Hogarth
Kate Battista feels stuck. How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and uppity, pretty younger sister Bunny? Plus, she's always in trouble at work - her pre-school charges adore her, but their parents don't always appreciate her unusual opinions and forthright manner.
Dr. Battista has other problems. After years out in the academic wilderness, he is on the verge of a breakthrough. His research could help millions. There's only one problem: his brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr, all would be lost.
When Dr. Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he's relying - as usual - on Kate to help him. Kate is furious: this time he's really asking too much. But will she be able to resist the two men's touchingly ludicrous campaign to bring her around?
I bought this book originally purely because of a sign. Not a portent sign, but an actual sign. Neon, actually, and registered as a historic landmark, it’s about 2 miles from us and sat over what was the Skipping Girl Vinegar factory.
Anyhoo, it sat on my TBR for years because … I bought it for its dubious coincidence of naming with a sign I’ve always liked. And I’ve never read The Taming of the Shrew, nor have I previously read any Anne Tyler titles. But yesterday I picked it up and read the flap and thought, yeah, why not?
It’s an easy one-day read, but it’s weird. I can’t say I liked it, but it wasn’t bad either. As individuals, the characters were well constructed, fleshed out. But put them together in a scene and they didn’t interact well with each other at all – they all turned into mechanical constructs that sort of bumped along together. Was this on purpose? I don’t know. But the result was a story that didn’t work, that felt clumsy and dysfunctional.
The ending was … I don’t know what the hell it was. (See: haven’t read Shakespeare, above.) It felt like Kate was assimilated into the Borg that is her father and Pyotr. There was a complete lack of emotion involved and a sense of passivity about all her movements. And there was quite a rousing Stepford wife speech at the end that I suspect Tyler meant in all sincerity but failed to sell me; had I been in that scene I’d have thrown food at her – preferably something sticky – and told her to get over herself. But then the epilogue clearly showed me that I missed a cue somewhere in the story, one that showed Kate definitely possessed a will of her own.
So … 3 stars because: weird.