Michael Bilotta Bilotta itibaren Purialito, Küba
** spoiler alert ** This was a pretty quick read. I saw it on display at bookstores for years and never had even the slightest tingle of interest in reading it. Not one bit. Fast forward to living in the middle of NOWHERE hundreds of miles from the nearest English bookstore, and you can get some idea of why I finally picked this up after a visitor left it behind. (Incidentally, that's how I acquire most of my reading materials these days.) Even with dismally low expectations, I still thought this book was sorta lame. Not offensively bad or anything, but poorly written, conceived, and filled with fluff. I nearly gagged at the ending when everything was wrapped up in this nice pretty bow made out of cheese and nostalgia. I did get through it out of pure curiosity about what was in store for the main characters, but little else. Amateurish prose and tedious descriptions made it drag. And I HATED the chapters that took place in the present in the old folks' home. I friggin' hate that gimmick in books and movies. It makes no sense to me, served no real purpose in the telling of this story (and rarely does... it just padded the length of Benjamin Button without adding substance, which might have been decent if it wasn't so long.....). I digress. I don't care about him as an old man. He's not interesting. He's a cliche, decrepit and curmudgeonly and forgetful—and forgotten by his family. So boring. I waited until the very end to see why we even needed to see him as an old man, and was let down by the supposed pay off of all those extra chapters and descriptions of old wrinkly man bits and toothless meals. All that should have been cut out. This book is for people who enjoy everything-ends-up-roses kind of crap. I feel like filling in the blanks between the main story in the 30s and the present discredited everything about the characters. I mean, c'mon. They go live on a perfect farm and live a perfect life filled with perfectly imperfect babies? Barf. Boring. Lame. There was absolutely ZERO relationship between Jacob as a young man and Jacob as an old man. None. There was nothing tying the present to the past expect for the circus being in town. It was all so lame. And BTW (SPOILER ALERT), did anyone else call bullshit on the fact that 8 men got thrown from a train while Jacob was skulking around and he didn't hear anything? I guess trains are loud and all, but those men didn't put up a fight? We know the window was open in the car he was in. Really? No screams or anything? Seriously?