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Friday, July 8, 2016

Hello Old Friend!

Even though it may not have been one of her best books, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Anne Tyler's Vinegar Girl.  The Baltimore setting, the quirky characters all evoked Tyler's fictional world revealed in her previous 20 novels.  I have always enjoyed Tyler's books and it felt like greeting an old friend to settle in with this one. Maybe the book wasn't up to the standards of her 1988 Pulitzer Prize winning Breathing Lessons or my personal favorite, The Accidental Tourist, but it was still clever and entertaining.

A quick read, great for summer relaxation, Tyler subtitles The Vinegar Girl - The Taming of the Shrew retold.  In Tyler's story, Kate Battista is the shrew, a 28-year-old nursery school assistant still living with her father and younger sister. Kate resists the overtures of his father's Russian lab assistant,  Pyotr, who needs to find a wife to prevent deportation.  Just like Shakespeare's comedy, Kate is eventually "tamed" and marries Pyotr. Whether it is a happy union or not will be yours to discover when you read this short novel. Though predictable at times,The Vinegar Girl lots of fun for a summer day. I received this book from Blogging for Books.