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    The Ballad of West Tenth Street: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Ballad of West Tenth Street: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Ballad of West Tenth Street: A Novel
    Ebook321 pages5 hours

    The Ballad of West Tenth Street: A Novel

    By Marjorie Kernan

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Once upon a time in Manhattan . . .

    . . . there stood a pair of fine old brick townhouses on West Tenth Street. One had a blue door with a tarnished brass knocker in the shape of a dolphin. The other was empty. Behind the blue door lived Sadie, the widow of a famous British rocker who died of an overdose, and two of her children, Hamish and Deen.

    The children manage to muddle along as best they can with a loving but distracted mother. But their whole world changes when the house next door gets a new owner—a mysterious Southerner who quickly endears himself to his new neighbors, taking them—and their friends—under his protective wing. In doing so, he transforms everything.

    Magical, lively, lovely, and unique, The Ballad of West Tenth Street is a contemporary urban fairy tale that delightfully reimagines real life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061971105
    Unavailable
    The Ballad of West Tenth Street: A Novel

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    Reviews for The Ballad of West Tenth Street

    3.5/5

    18 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This is a great debut novel for a new fiction author! It's a book that I wasn't able to put down. Most of the characters are fun to follow through the ups and downs of life in present-day New York City (and beyond); there was only one character I didn't care for. Although I thought the ending was a little abrupt -- it didn't seem to wrap up all the characters and plots -- I highly recommend this book for a good, fun, quick read. I can't wait to see what author Marjorie Kernan comes up with next!
    • 4/5
      A modern fairy tale set in New York, this novel centers around two row houses which are inhabited by two very different families. Packed with authentic characters, this slice-of-life tale is charming, sweet and wise. Almost a year after I read it, I can still hear her characters in my head as if they were my friends -- high praise, indeed. With a bit of scary reality and several unexpected plot twists, Kernan's first book shines.
    • 2/5
      This book made me miserable throughout, and I only finished out of stubbornness, and because I was stuck with it while visiting my mom over the weekend, and because I just quit a book a couple of weeks ago (for the same reason I wanted to quit this one) and didn't want to do it again so soon. Poor writing abounds here, as in prose riddled with cliches and horrid metaphors plus entirely unbelievable characters.For example, at the beginning we are presented with a main character whose alcoholism seems out of control, and given the rather effective image of her 12-year-old son dolefully counting the empty bottles as he drops them into the recycling bin. But it turns out that this woman's steady drinking has no more effect on her than constant imbibing affected Nick and Nora Charles. While I love the Thin Man movies, by now we know better. The teenage kids are too erudite, the neighbors all entirely too beneficent, and there is a character revelation on page 260 that literally made me curse aloud.Characterizations and prose like this:"Kristen, in all truth, lied to herself mightily with her next thought. She thought how much she liked Sadie. She was so bohemian, such a character, and hadn't she stayed unmarried since Ree had passed away? That's the term Kristen invariably used for death."Metaphors like this . . ."Above, a pair of screech owls called to each other, their sounds as infinite a part of the forest as all the other parts of it . . . "Cliches, etc . . .A man in a coma, viewed in the hospital for the first time, hooked up to all the attendant tubes and machinery is described like so: "He looked like something the cat dragged in."And then this . . ."Titus (he is a cat) prowled around (his owner's--a street person) supine form and the broken ground outside, killing rats and mice and eating them with wondrous relish, . . ."It is that "wondrous" that depresses me so much. What is "wondrous" about the appetite of a starving cat? This is a whole book full of such adverbs. It's as if the story were being told us by some fictional, cliched old aunt, the kind that only exists in bad fairy tales. (And, yes, the back of the book describes this novel as "a contemporary urban fairy tale," so I guess I should have been warned.) There is a page-long scene told us through the eyes of, I kid you not, an old, stone carving.But that clunkiness becomes particularly maddening when the "wondrous mouse" passage ends thusly:"Thus, the old captain and his cat shared hours of sleep in the dusty, strewn depot, two more objects among the broken furniture." A lovely image! See? You can do it! All this time we could have been friends!The take-away, then, is what? That Harper Perennial no longer has editors? That they think people want to read prose littered with the rotting hulks of festering cliches and fabulously over-precious observations? Is it because the author is a woman and publishers now have so little respect for their female audience? They don't really think women will buy anything as long as it's written by another woman, do they?On the back cover we're told, "Marjorie Kernan, a former painter, owns an antiques shop on the coast of Maine. This is her first novel." In the "Meet Marjorie Kernan" section at the end of the book, we're told, "Several years ago, while sitting in a truck cab in France, bored out of her mind, she began to think of writing a novel."So now I can add a third item, along with marriage and parenthood, to things one shouldn't decide to do out of boredom.Kernan, according to that Meet the Author section, is at work on another novel. I hope it will be better. I hope she will become a famous, quality novelist and The Ballad of West Tenth Street becomes that first novel the nobody ever reads.