Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann is not going to be for everybody -- and one can't help but think it doesn't hurt to be a member of a global literary royalty (her father Richard is author of the revered biographies of both James Joyce and Oscar Wilde), but whoa! I can't wait to read it.
Jon Day's review in the London Review of Books, Dec. 5, sold me with this line:
"Ellmann endows her narrator with a language entirely appropriate to her personality: polite and self-consciously self-doubting."
More than most anything else that's what I want from a book these days ... to remove myself for however long it takes into the mind of a narrator who is seen as "polite and self-consciously self-doubting."
Next: Running for Your Life: Christmas Pineapple
