Ah... this book was perfect for me right now, it seemed. Just one part-Margarette Towne's daughter ends up being named Jane. And near the end, N. gives her advice; it seems as it is written to me. It says: "I wish i could tell you to always follow your heart, but i think it is bad advice. You have a heart, yes, it is true, but also a brain and also a soul. I've come to believe that we love with our brains as much as our hearts. Real Love is not just instinct, but intent...... From year to year,

An unconventional tale of love, life and death. But specially of love.You could say this is another story of an ordinary couple who fall in and out of love, as we all do sometime in life.Or you could say this is a unique tale of an extraordinary woman, who is five different women at the same time, and who dies because she is eighty-seven or thirty-five.A cursed woman or a blessed one, because she is loved, deeply and intensely loved by her husband, the narrator of the story.His voice is steady a...

From the synopsis, I thought I was picking up a book that was going to be an artsy metaphor about how people change over time. That's probably what it wanted to be, but it wasn't.It started out well enough, though I found that the characters spoke in a very unnatural, Fred Astaire movie sort of way, and the titular Margaret was some sort of manic pixie dream girl gone wrong from the getgo. The book eventually drops the metaphor and goes the fairytale route: there are quite literally several diff...

i found this book a little bizarre. it was good. and it had an interesting concept, which i can't really explain without giving a lot of the interesting stuff away. but the concept is sort of silly at the same time. all the same it's a great, easy read. no real work involved to get into the character development or storyline. it wraps you in almost immediately and you're eager enough to come back for more, to see what happens next.but i must warn that it was a little weird at parts. not really o...

Read first Jan 04, 2011. Reading it again this weekend 5 years later..Wow. It resonates so deep with me now, more so than it did right out of high school. I found myself highlighting quote after quote. I feel like as I grow older each year, I become more sentimental (even though I'm still cynical and an angry soul). I need more books like this in my life.From 2011:Amazing book. Unique story. I read it in one night. Definitely recommend.

“The casualties seemed to go on and on. Just when I thought I was done losing her, I would find yet another way to love her all over again.”After a bit of the thought, I've decided to give this book four stars. It's sad, funny, extremely weird, and the romance sometimes felt a bit one-sided (Margaret was built up to be this almost mythological figure in the narrator's mind, while in her mind she just calls him "my husband" and he doesn't even have a name) but I loved this compassionate, honest p...

Have you ever seen Life is Beautiful? It's an Italian film set during the Holocaust, and it stars Roberto Benigni, the guy who said he wanted to “kiss everybody” when he accepted his Oscar for Best Actor for the role.It's absolutely magical, which may sound like a strange thing to say about a movie set primarily in a concentration camp, but that's what happens when someone as effusive and whimsical as Benigni is involved. He plays a man named Guido who is taken to Auschwitz along with his wife a...

Can I give this book five stars for every person whom has ever occupied "Christinetown"? If I could, I would. This book was so many things, and all of them were beautiful. It is a love story, it is a story of self-discovery, and it is a story of how we see others. Love, I have learned from this book and hope to learn from life, is not about loving just one person; it is about loving every person that one has been and every person they will become.

I loved this book so much. ♥️

3-3.5starFast reading. I like the concept at the 1st chapter, but it isn't executed well after that. The style is very like The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry which is better than this one, that's why this author become a better one.

I applaud the author's creativity. She's a great storyteller. I love how she wrote so creatively about the different people we all have inside us. If we could more easily see all those different aspects of our personalities when relating to others, the world would be a different place.Also, we all struggle to love our spouse, who also offers a range of different sides to their personality, some which we like much better than others. Yet we must deal with the whole person, even the parts we don't...

What a neat, bizarre little book this was. Margarettown is actually a letter from father to daughter, telling the tale of how he meets her mother, Margaret, and his life thereafter. I loved the blurred lines between fable and reality, where you wonder if the narrator is being imaginative, a little deluded, or just trying to compensate for the aspects of Margaret he couldn’t understand. There is a deep sadness and regret in his remembering and retelling, tinged with a sense of humor and hope that...

A slightly magical, quirky, insightful and sad story about various stages of life and love, Margarettown is a gem of originality. Our narrator, unreliable N. falls in love with Maggie, a self-proclaimed"cursed" woman, who then takes him home and introduces him to several versions of herself. The story then becomes more mundane, a marriage falling apart, slowly, but that also makes it more beautiful, more real, as the fairy tale love story is never really quite real, is it? The last part of the b...

The first words out of my mouth when I finished this book were, "this was lovely and confusing at the same time." And I think that's what Zevin was going for...leaving it up to the reader to make their own endings, to come up with their own ideas about N. and Margaret Towne. It was a lovely and confusing book.

N's section reads a lot like a John Green novel in terms of how he describes his love for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and I nearly stopped reading it a couple of times, but it was worth finishing, and the chapters written from the perspectives of Margaret and Jane were very charming. I loved what was written about names in and also the name Margaret and all it's different forms and nicknames. I thought it was very weird how N writes about sex in the letters to his daughter, and the way the birth...

I love ms. Zevin's storiesGabrielle Zevin has an incredible gift for story telling, creating remarkably relatable and, usually, lovely characters, with such fantastic dialogues....I am forever amazed. I have read six of her stories and love five of them. "The hole we're in," i found highly depressing and I won't mention it again. It's hard to say which story is my favorite but since I just finished Margarettown (or is it argarettow? ) this is my new favorite. This story is just an onion, with so...

I can't help but imagine this book as a Wes Anderson film. I mean come on, there's already a character with an eye patch! This was a fun, fast read that was surprisingly thought-provoking. I tabbed several pages because I identified so strongly with Zevin's prose. "To go to sleep and wake up next to the same person for the rest of your life, to stay even when you long to go- these are the real rituals of love."

Extremely divided on this book. There were moments-- lots of moments, especially in the first half-- where I loathed the narration, and the fanciful liberties seemed "more confusing than cool". But then there were lines that resonated beautifully-- "Sometimes, we say what is not quite true with the hope that it will become true"-- how "[it's] all decided in two or three moments"-- "love is usually finite, but still worthwhile for as long as it lasts"-- and admittedly I teared up on the final pag...

A tragic, disturbed and hard to describe romance story told in an original and quirky way. Margaret Towne falls for her assistant philosophy professor, a good-looking but unreliable man who proposes to her by tying a piece of twine around her finger without actually asking. He narrates the story of their courtship with only a glancing nod to reality, describing Margaret's complex personality by inventing multiple versions of her with different nicknames to represent her at different stages of li...

A tale, soon to seem surreal and allegorical, about his lover Margaret, is narrated by N_ for their daughter Jane. Margaret's story away from him (told third person), and the opinions of other characters superimpose another view. Something like that. Ultimately the story doesn't end. Jane continues with her own choices made. This is a love story, and a story about the desires, complications and contradictions of love itself. I found it clever, amusing, deep, humane, fantastic, and insightful! I