Read: July, 2011
Recommended To: Women of all ages; men can and should read it too, but the core of the story is a friendship between two women, so I really recommend reading it if you are a woman.
Categories: Fiction, Friendships, Love, Family-Relations
Firefly Lane is a gripping, emotional, powerful novel about love, loss, and most importantly, friendship. We meet the main characters, Kate & Tully, two girls on the cusp of becoming teenagers, living together on Firefly Lane, in the summer of 1974. Kate, a shy, awkward loner, is befriended to her surprise by the popular, outgoing Tully, and despite their differences, they two become the best of friends. The book follows the journey of their friendship through the decades as they grow up and become adults, as their friendship changes and grows, as jealously, betrayal & anger threaten it. As their lives and friendship go through changes time & again over the years, the girls learn that making the promise to be best friends forever is a lot easier than keeping it.
Personal Thoughts
One warning; before you start reading this book, make sure you have a box of tissues handy. I, unfortunately, didn't realize I was out of tissues, and ended up using 1/2 a roll of toilet paper drying up my tears! I was not expecting this book to hit me so hard emotionally, and I could explain why it did, but that of course would ruin the story! So, I will just say that I'm not usually one to cry over a book, but this one was something special. Rarely is someone able to capture the essence of friendship in a realistic way the way that Kristin Hannah did in this book. I find a lot of relationships in novels that I have read feel way too forced to fit in with the plot line; the author tries so hard to fit them into a little box, and the relationships between people therefore do not come across as natural, or realistic. The characters and their relationships are just a means to a end; they are there to support the plot. But, in Firefly Lane, I felt like the friendship between Kate & Tully was realistic, felt natural, and the plot line was there to support the story of their friendship, rather than the other way around; it makes for a novel that is character-driven, and emotionally rich.
Pros
* Very realistic, well-crafted characters, and natural, believable relationships between the characters.
* Emotionally rich & captivating.
* Good balance between story & dialogue.
* Kristin Hannah's descriptive, poetic style of writing really helped to set the atmosphere of the novel; reading certain passages really invoked a lot of my own memories of childhood, and I could really imagine the scenes as they occurred.
Cons
* Okay, this is a big one, and which is the main reason why I only gave this book 8/10; it is long. There are times when it drags a bit. I started to get frustrated part way through, because even though I was enjoying the writing, it felt like it was taking forever at times for the storyline to move along. There is a lot of time covered in this novel, so I don't think it could have been realistically shortened, but in my opinion, this would have been better off as a 2 or 3 book series, instead of shoving it all in one big book. The way the story was told, it easily could have been done.
* While, for the most part, I appreciated Kristin Hannah's gift for descriptiveness, at times, it was too much; she described the outfits everyone wore in great detail constantly, which ends up being a lot of outfits over the 30 years covered in the book. Sometimes, description really adds to a story; sometimes it really takes away. This is an example of it detracting. I understand that it's necessary to make some comments on clothing to set the atmosphere, especially with the changes in fashion over the decades covered, but I really did not need minute detail that didn't affect the actual story whatsoever.
OTHER BOOKS BY KRISTIN HANNAH:
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