The Amateur Marriage
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Blair Brown
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By:
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Anne Tyler
About this listen
Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable.
From the sound of the cash register in the old grocery to the counterculture jargon of the sixties, from the miniskirts to the multilayered apparel of later years, Anne Tyler captures the evocative nuances of everyday life during these decades with such telling precision that every page brings smiles of recognition. Throughout, as each of the competing voices bears witness, we are drawn ever more fully into the complex entanglements of family life in this wise, embracing, and deeply perceptive novel.
©2004 Anne Tyler (P)2004 Random House, Inc., Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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"[Anne] Tyler's strength resides in her penetrating psychological portraits and delight in mundane details, and these gifts are evident....Her observations about how abruptly even the most boring life can go wrong, and about the fact that we are all amateurs in our first marriages, are poignant." (Booklist)
"Yes, Tyler intuitively understands the middle class' Norman Rockwell ideal, but she doesn't share it; rather, she has a masterful ability to make it bleed." (Publishers Weekly)
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Greta Cahill never believed she would leave her village in the west of Ireland until she found herself on a ship bound for New York, along with her sister Johanna and a boy named Michael Ward. Labeled a "softheaded goose" by her family, Greta discovers that in America she can fall in love, raise her own family, and earn a living.
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Irish immigratn story
- By Chrissie on 09-10-13
By: Mary Beth Keane
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The Rest of Her Life
- By: Laura Moriarty
- Narrated by: Julia Gibson
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Leigh is the mother of high-achieving, popular high school senior Kara. Their relationship is already strained for reasons Leigh does not fully understand when, in a moment of carelessness, Kara makes a mistake that ends in tragedy, the effects of which not only divide Leigh's family, but polarize the entire community.
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Obnoxious musical interludes ruin the story
- By Joan on 12-25-11
By: Laura Moriarty
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Stars over Sunset Boulevard
- By: Susan Meissner
- Narrated by: Ann Marie Lee
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Los Angeles, present day. When an iconic hat worn by Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind ends up in Christine McAllister's vintage clothing boutique by mistake, her efforts to return it to its owner take her on a journey more enchanting than any classic movie.... Los Angeles, 1938. Violet Mayfield sets out to reinvent herself in Hollywood after her dream of becoming a wife and mother falls apart, and she lands a job on the film set of Gone with the Wind.
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Pass on this
- By Lulew on 03-24-17
By: Susan Meissner
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The One-in-a-Million Boy
- By: Monica Wood
- Narrated by: Chris Ciulla
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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For years, guitarist Quinn Porter has been on the road, chasing gig after gig, largely absent to his twice-ex-wife Belle and their odd, Guinness records-obsessed son. When the boy dies suddenly, Quinn seeks forgiveness for his paternal shortcomings by completing the requirements for one of his son's unfinished Boy Scout badges. For seven Saturdays Quinn does yard work for Ona Vitkus, the spry 104-year-old Lithuanian immigrant the boy had visited weekly.
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Loved it
- By Justin on 10-20-16
By: Monica Wood
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To See the Moon Again
- By: Jamie Langston Turner
- Narrated by: Eva Kaminsky
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The first step to letting go of the past is forgiving it …Every day of her life Julia Rich lives with the memory of a horrible accident she caused long ago. In the years since, she has tried to hide her guilt in the quiet routine of teaching at a small South Carolina college, avoiding close relationships with family and would-be friends. But one day a phone call from Carmen, a niece she has never met, disrupts her carefully controlled world.
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Beautiful Story of Forgiveness and Selfless Love
- By sharon on 09-20-14
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Far From the Tree
- By: Virginia DeBerry, Donna Grant
- Narrated by: Fran L. Washington
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Celeste English and Ronnie Frazier are sisters, but they couldn't be more different. Celeste is a doctor's wife, living a perfect and elegant façade. But secretly, her marriage is falling apart and her need to control people around her threatens to destroy them all. Ronnie is an actress, living in New York. But she has no money, she has no home, and her life is held together by "chewing gum, paper clips, and spit." When their father dies, the sisters inherit a house in Prosper, North Carolina.
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My Favorite Book So Far, by Far!
- By Dee on 04-19-09
By: Virginia DeBerry, and others
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Bettyville
- By: George Hodgman
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself - an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook - in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can't bring himself to force her from the home both treasure - the place where his father's voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict...
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Title Should Be Georgeville-It's All About George
- By Sara on 10-08-15
By: George Hodgman
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The Untelling
- By: Tayari Jones
- Narrated by: Michele Blackmon
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Aria is no stranger to tragedy. Fifteen years ago, a family outing took the lives of her father and baby sister, leaving remaining members of this fractured family struggling with their own guilt - real and imagined. At 25, Aria believes she can reinvent herself through her planned marriage with all its promise of a family of her own. Her infertility changes her life as swiftly and irrevocably as the urban landscape around her.
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Don’t waste your time!
- By shasha on 09-18-20
By: Tayari Jones
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Family Secrets
- A Novel
- By: Nancy Thayer
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Though Diane Randall’s jewelry business is a great success, her marriage is not, and she finds herself growing lonely as her children near adulthood. Meanwhile, her eighteen-year-old daughter Julia is falling dangerously in love, and Diane’s mother, Jean, is relishing her newfound freedom as a single woman in Europe. Distracted by their individual concerns, the three women are ill-prepared for the crisis that suddenly appears on Diane’s doorstep in the form of a handsome FBI agent asking about an explosive secret that’s laid buried for decades.
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Nancy! Is there a sequel? What?
- By PattieLynn on 12-02-22
By: Nancy Thayer
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Boy, Snow, Bird
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett, Carra Patterson
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty - the opposite of the life she' s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she' d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy' s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white.
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For Literary Lovers
- By M. Shipe on 04-25-14
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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The Wednesday Sisters
- By: Meg Waite Clayton
- Narrated by: Julie Dretzin
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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For 35 years, Frankie, Linda, Kath, Brett, and Ally have met every Wednesday at the park near their homes in Palo Alto, California. Defined when they first meet by what their husbands do, the young homemakers and mothers are far removed from the Summer of Love that has enveloped most of the Bay Area in 1967.
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Loved it!
- By Denise Wallace on 06-26-09
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Terrific book, outstanding narration.
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Maggie and Ira Moran are on a road trip from Baltimore, Maryland, to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania, to attend the funeral of a friend. Along the way, they reflect on the state of their marriage, its trials, and its triumphs - through their quarrels, their routines, and their ability to tolerate each other's faults with patience and affection.
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This novel has earned all the recognition ---
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Disappointed Diehard Tyler Fan
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The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common.
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Definitely not my favorite
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Terrific book, outstanding narration.
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Wonderful characters
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Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit. But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.
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This novel has earned all the recognition ---
- By DLTBGYD on 11-20-22
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Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life. But one day, his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late 30s a "girlfriend") tells him she's facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son. These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah's meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever.
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Disappointed Diehard Tyler Fan
- By Suze on 04-13-20
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Definitely not my favorite
- By 80 Oaks on 03-31-22
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A Spool of Blue Thread
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"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon..." This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture.
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The Sharp Edge Of Family
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Through the syncopated rhythms of the ragtime era to the thumping, rocking beats of the 1970s, generations of Pecks have maintained a determined steadiness. Adamantly middle-class - Peck-proud, as the family slogan goes - they are quick to sweep under the rug those members who do not live up to their standards. Maybe that's why Caleb Peck took off with his violincello as a boy? Sixty years later, his brother, Daniel, is still wondering.
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Interesting Story!
- By GoodLife on 04-18-24
By: Anne Tyler
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Saint Maybe
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Ian Bedloe is the ideal teenage son, leading a cheery, apple-pie life with his family in Baltimore. That is, until a careless and vicious rumor leads to a devastating tragedy. Imploding from guilt, Ian believes he is the one responsible for the tragedy. No longer a star athlete with a bright future, and desperately searching for salvation, he stumbles across a storefront with a neon sign that simply reads: Church of the Second Chance. Ian has always viewed his penance as a burden. But through the power of faith and the love of family, he begins to view it as a gift.
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Brilliant
- By MNtea on 02-26-22
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Clock Dance
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Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life. In 1967, she is a schoolgirl coping with her mother's sudden disappearance. In 1977, she is a college coed considering a marriage proposal. In 1997, she is a young widow trying to piece her life back together. And in 2017, she yearns to be a grandmother but isn't sure she ever will be. Then, one day, Willa receives a startling phone call from a stranger. Without fully understanding why, she flies across the country to Baltimore....
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disappointed
- By Amazon Customer on 07-13-18
By: Anne Tyler
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Earthly Possessions
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Charlotte Emory has always lived a quiet, conventional life in Clarion, Maryland. She lives as simply as possible and one day decides to simplify everything and leave her husband. Her last trip to the bank throws Charlotte's life into an entirely different direction when a restless young man in a nylon jacket takes her hostage during the robbery - and soon the two are heading south into an unknown future and a most unexpected fate.
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Lovely writing
- By J Matalon on 10-29-24
By: Anne Tyler
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Digging to America
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Two families, who would otherwise never have come together, meet by chance at the Baltimore airport: the Donaldsons, a very American couple, and the Yazdans, Maryam's fully assimilated son and his attractive Iranian wife. Each couple is awaiting the arrival of an adopted infant daughter from Korea. After the instant babies from distant Asia are delivered, Bitsy Donaldson impulsively invites the Yazdans to celebrate.
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Life in transition
- By Everett Leiter on 08-20-06
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The Beginner's Goodbye
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Anne Tyler gives us a wise, haunting, and deeply moving new novel in which she explores how a middle-aged man, torn apart by the death of his wife, is gradually restored by her frequent appearances: in their house, on the roadway, in the market. Gradually he discovers, as he works in the family's vanity-publishing business, turning out titles that presume to guide beginners through the trials of life, that maybe for this beginner there is a way of saying goodbye.
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Anne Tyler at her Best
- By Elizabeth Ward on 05-06-12
By: Anne Tyler
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The Accidental Tourist
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Travel writer Macon Leary hates travel, adventure, surprises, and anything outside of his routine. Immobilized by grief, Macon is becoming increasingly prickly and alone, anchored by his solitude and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts. Then he meets Muriel, an eccentric dog trainer too optimistic to let Macon disappear into himself. Despite Macon’s best efforts to remain insulated, Muriel upends his solitary, systemized life, catapulting him into the center of a messy, beautiful love story he never imagined.
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A Favorite
- By eulamen on 06-03-21
By: Anne Tyler
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A Patchwork Planet
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Barnaby Gaitlin was never a bad kid, but he was certainly doing his best to impersonate one. As a teenager, he developed a habit of breaking into other people’s houses. But he wasn’t interested in the valuable loot - he just liked to read people’s mail, peruse their family albums, and maybe pocket a few personal mementos. Now almost 30 and divorced, he finds himself working for Rent-aBack, which helps the elderly and infirm move furniture or take down their Christmas trees. It’s the perfect career for Barnaby.
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amazing
- By Susan on 06-06-21
By: Anne Tyler
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The Tin Can Tree
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In the small town of Larksville, the Pike family is hopelessly out of step with the daily rhythms of life. Mrs. Pike seldom speaks, while Mr. Pike maintains a forced stoicism. Only their 10-year-old, Simon, seems able to acknowledge that their world has changed. He just doesn't understand why. The Pikes may choose to stand still, to hide from an unnamable past, but the strange shroud over their home cannot be contained.
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The characterization
- By Linda on 01-28-24
By: Anne Tyler
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Morgan's Passing
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Morgan Gower is bored of the tedium of his ordinary life: of his job as manager of a run-down hardware store; of his wife; of his "industriously dull" daughters; of his mother; of his sister. But Morgan's secret escape lies in a box filled with costumes, filled with everything from a fake beard to Napoleon's tricorne to Daniel Boone, all of which provide an outlet away from his life and into the identity of someone who is assuredly not Morgan Gower.
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Nothing good to say
- By RH on 05-06-24
By: Anne Tyler
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Noah's Compass
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Liam Pennywell, who set out to be a philosopher and ended up teaching fifth grade, never much liked the job at that run-down private school, so early retirement doesnt bother him. But he is troubled by his inability to remember anything about the first night that he moved into his new, spare, and efficient condominium on the outskirts of Baltimore. All he knows when he wakes up the next day in the hospital is that his head is sore and bandaged.
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Doesn't measure up
- By kimberly on 01-13-10
By: Anne Tyler
What listeners say about The Amateur Marriage
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Charlotte E. Cyphers
- 06-03-15
The Summer Book!
Beach and pool. Another great AT ! Tears at the finish. What more do you want?!
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1 person found this helpful
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- William C. Harrop
- 06-14-16
A Moving Story
Human, warm and real, characters fully developed. Funny, even hilarious moments, and a gathering sadness. Anne Tyler is a master at conversation. Skilled narration. At the end of our trip we had a half hour remaining so we sat in the garage and heard it out.
William Harrop
Bethesda, MD
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Overall
- Carolann Moore
- 04-09-04
Amateur Marriage
I like Anne Tyler and she managed to keep a rather mundane story interesting. I do not think it was one of her best. I felt a little disconnected at the end, and I didn't much like the way she made her main character dissapear. There was something disturbing about the story, as I'm sure the author intended. It was not a warm fuzzy that left you satisfied. It wasn't very uplifting.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Patricia B Tripoli
- 05-16-10
Entertaining But Lacking
This book is more a reflection of how easy it is to give up on a marriage today than anything else. Just walk away. The wife is someone I would want to walk away from, but that is not the point. The husband is no winner and the kids must manage the parents lives at some points.
Aside from the skipping around, giving no explanations or depths for significant events (the daughter running away, the wife dying), this book totally frustrated me!!
The narration was excellent. I just wish the story was as good.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Mariah
- 01-31-04
Vintage Anne Tyler But Different
The Amateur Marriage is a nearly vintage Anne Tyler novel:, offering a slightly off-kilter family, a fine sense of time and place and an excellent eye for detail expressed in well-turned phrases. But this book is written on a larger canvas than her others, spanning over 40 years in the lives of Pauline and Michael Anton. The story begins in 1941 at the start of World War II when Pauline falls in love with Michael for no other reason than she needed a man to send off to war. But Michael?s war career is short-lived and he soon comes limping back to Baltimore and into Pauline?s waiting arms. They quickly marry and live with Michael?s mother over the family grocery story. It is immediately clear that the couple is not a perfect fit. Pauline is impulsive, determined and ambitious while Michael is slow, plodding and perfectly happy in his small inner-city grocery store. Pauline?s will prevails, however, and the couple?along with Mother Anton and their new daughter, Lindy?move to one of the spanking new suburbs that blossomed around the country in the early 50s. Michael opens a new grocery story and the family adds to two more children. Except for the constant bickering between Pauline and Michael, all is well until Lindy abruptly vanishes, the only trace of her the three-year old son she abandons in San Francisco. Still devastated over the loss of their daughter, the Antons bravely press on and begin another round of carpools to raise their missing daughter?s son. Unlike most Tyler novels, this one contains no epiphanies, no sudden moments of understanding. Instead, there is a rather helpless sense of time rushing on while the characters spin out their lives caught up in trivialities. And while Tyler might be criticized for giving her characters little or no motivations for their life?s choices, she can be praised for creating a family we like and care about. And that is what makes this novel worth reading.
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14 people found this helpful
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- Marly
- 08-26-20
Beautiful story
This is a treasure of a book. The characters are real and developed with care. The story is real and unvarnished. Unlike a lot of Anne Tyler’s characters, these are not dysfunctional and silly. They are ordinary people making their way along through life as best as they know how. Things seldom work out like a fairy tale.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Gary
- 07-03-16
If you like this one, you'll love "Home Fires"
Our natures determine who we are. The way we see the world whether through our passions, intuition, reason or rational thought (logic) makes our basic essence. The two main characters in this story have different essences and they and their family must learn to adapt or separate. Sometimes, reality is more complex than fiction will allow and our nature is changed by adding another unit. Unfortunately, for the protagonists in this story that is not the case.
It turns out that truth can be stranger than fiction and a true story with all the same kinds of characters this book contains has already been written by the founder of Audible, Donald Katz, in the book "Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America". I would even bet that Anne Tyler was inspired by that book (not that there is anything wrong with that) and loosely based her story on that book, because all the characters within the "Amateur Marriage" have a counterpart within "Home Fires" and their story is more completely told while giving insights to the time period in greater detail.
Truth can enlighten more than fiction and in the case of "Home Fires" it entertains even more than fiction did.
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- Dee Aye
- 09-04-21
Real life has real lessons
Overall it was interesting walking through the lives of this family. I've never been married but Michael and Pauline remind me of relationships I've been in with people I have not been a good match for. Reminded of the thoughts we ignore, and how we work so hard to let the love we have keep us going day by day. At some point everyone finds their own liberation in this book, though some of it may be set in the sadness of dealing with life. Seemed to be a very real family story with lessons on how to care for ourselves and others, if we are willing to see them in this story. And the narration was done well.
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- Christina
- 06-10-04
Engaging and thought provoking
I thoroughly enjoyed this, as I do all of Tyler's books. She has a way of capturing exactly what you are feeling, and of embracing life with all its imperfections. I am surprised that others found the story uninteresting. I was completely caught up in it, to the point that I turned it on in my car even if I was going a short distance. It is true that one of the main characters is almost unbearably depressing toward the end, but I like books that do not shy away from difficult subjects, and I thought the ending nicely redeemed this thread. Not for those who want a happy story, but great for those who want writing that beautifully articulates the human condition.
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- NMwritergal
- 12-20-15
One of my favorite Anne Tyler books
Seems like this one is a "really like it" or "really don't like it" with listeners/readers. For me, it was one of my favorites.
Great plot, great characters, great Audible narrator. Tyler juggles characters and time very well. Even though years and years pass, you don't feel shortchanged. The story and characters still feel fully realized.
I think Spool of Blue Thread is my all-time favorite Tyler novel, however.
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3 people found this helpful