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alobearThe Braid by Laetitia Colombani felt like a missed opportunity to me. It tells the story of three very different women leading three very different lives (with a fourth who eventually links them all together) - Smita living in desperate poverty in India, Giulia trying to keep the family business alive in Sicily, and Sarah trying to maintain her career as a lawyer in Canada.
The stories are all interesting and the characters are all well-drawn, but the narrative felt more like a summary outline to me than an actual story most of the time. As the book is only 200 pages long, I felt like all three plot strands could have been brought alive with a lot more dialogue, a lot more direct action scenes and a lot more emotional heft, and the book could have been even twice a long and a hundred times more effective.
The idea is great, and the way it all comes together in the end is clever, but it felt like someone describing their idea of the story to me, rather than me being given the opportunity to actually live it with the characters.
The stories are all interesting and the characters are all well-drawn, but the narrative felt more like a summary outline to me than an actual story most of the time. As the book is only 200 pages long, I felt like all three plot strands could have been brought alive with a lot more dialogue, a lot more direct action scenes and a lot more emotional heft, and the book could have been even twice a long and a hundred times more effective.
The idea is great, and the way it all comes together in the end is clever, but it felt like someone describing their idea of the story to me, rather than me being given the opportunity to actually live it with the characters.
