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A wonderful story of loss, coping, understanding ones own actions or failure to act. A telling to help heal one's past...Tayari is a truly talented storyteller. Her characters are so real and their challenges and life experiences are familiar and believable. I didn't want to stop reading and wanted more when it ended. I highly recommend this novel.
I was all ready to love this book after reading Silver Sparrow and An American Marriage, but it just ok for me. It was hard to really get vested into any of the characters and I didn't enjoy the ending. I was an ok book but definitely not as good as I expected. That being I still love Tayari Jones and can't wait to read Leaving Atlanta.
I liked The Untelling but didn’t love it, like I did Jones’ Silver Sparrow. The book tells the story of a family who experiences great tragedy early on and the secrets they harbor and how it effects them throughout the years and into current day. I was expecting something a little more, but still a good read.
The Untelling was solemn, slow, soulful and aching. Every Tayari Jones book I've read so far has been a unique experience, but all of her works are a testament to her complete mastery of the art of the written word. I am deeply impressed by everything she does, and so very lucky I get to experience her work. There are few writers and few books which have stirred my emotions in the way Tayari Jones seems to do with ease. Just phenomenal.
This is honestly one of the best books I've ever read about a person who doesn't think she deserves to be happy.
Heard about Tayari Jones from a few online friends, and picked up this book because I wanted to read some contemporary fiction by a black woman writer who is about my age (30s). I read up to page 36 or so and then put it down; the beginning was compelling, but I stopped at a point in which it was unclear what was going to happen next. I sat myself down with it about a week later and read the remaining 300 pages over the next 24 hours. Plot-wise, things move slowly and there are a lot of flashbac...
Ariadne is nine years old when the family is in an automobile accident on the way to her dance recital. Her father and baby sister, Genevieve, die. Aria, her older sister, Hermione, and their mother survive. But all three carry serious emotional scars from the event. Now it is sixteen years later and they are living independent lives. Hermione is married and the mother of a toddler, living in the suburbs and almost never returns Aria’s phone calls. Their mother is a bitter woman, who uses her el...
The Untelling is a story of lies--lies of omission and lies meant to mislead, lies told to others and told to ourselves. The truth is a hard nut to crack sometimes, but there are always consequences. Damaged by a childhood tragedy that overshadows the rest of her life, protagonist Aria backs herself into corners that have predictable results for the plot. That's not to say the book was boring or not compelling, but it's fairly obvious the way events will play out. Getting there is worth it, thou...
I have now read three sad books by Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow, An American Marriage, and now the Untelling. The first two books were "troublesome," in leaving many threads unraveled. I just finished this book that left me in tears. How does it happen that the love and marriage can become unraveled? The backdrop for this book is the Spelman girls, growing up in Atlanta, in houses left-over in the neighborhoods run-down by students who didn't have the resources to keep them up. Their mother gave...
I liked it, but not as much as Leaving Atlanta (which was very good) or Silver Sparrow (which I LOVED). The story wasn't what I initially thought it would be--for some reason by the description on the inside front jacket I thought it would be more of a trauma narrative. There is trauma in the novel, but the story moves slower so there's less emotional impact (at least, until the end) than most stories of past trauma. Instead, this book was more of a character study of a young woman. Jones took h...
Tayari Jones once again takes her reader to Atlanta for an insider's view of an African American family who've suffered loss through an automobile accident. Aria and her sister navigate their own grief and their mother's destructive grieving. The Untelllng is a nuanced, complex depiction of the econmic stratification of Black Atlanta and is a good tale nicely told.
I really, really wanted to like this book. I recently saw the author speak and I really liked her. The story had so much potential but it just fell painfully short. The over use of metaphors almost killed me like a snake slowly squeezes the life out of a mouse. See what I did there?
Okay. So I've had some time to let the effects of having read this book wear off a bit. I feel that I'm ready to talk about it without revealing my soul here. Excuse me if I'm long-winded. This book connected some life-dots for me, so y'all bear with me. I've never read a novel that caused me to do so much self-reflection that I actually had a breakthrough...like a real life breakthrough...like the kind you could get from therapy or something. Actually, I might feel less weird about this whole t...
it was a little slow for me and not very inviting but i listened to it fully.
i really got caught up in this story. the hints towards the secret that needs to be told (or untold)set you up for the sesmic boom at the end. loved it.
I picked this up because Jones’ most recent book, An American Marriage, isn’t available at the local libraries here. It’s checked out to 20+ people. So, I am awaiting ‘my turn’. As other reviewers have indicated I kept looking for hints to why the book was called The Untelling. To me, it’s a metaphorical way of saying Revealing the Truth. Certainly the main character is mired, not only in her secrets(she needs to tell her fiancé the truth about something that could potentially jeopardize their m...
I really wanted to give it 2.5 stars, but the bloody rating system rounds off. It's like when you're an 8 1/2 and all of the shoes you like only come in whole sizes. Anyway, I didn't like this one as much as Leaving Atlanta or Silver Sparrow. The depth of Atlanta's point of view and the richness of Sparrow's characters, story, and imagery were just not present. There are glimpses of the much more lyrical and visual Jones toward the end of the book, which I respect much more than the rest of the
Rating 3.75I read Tayari Jones book An American Marriage and was immediately taken with the writing. I was so drawn into the story and couldn't wait to read more by this author. I decided to grab the audio version of this one and was hooked in the beginning. Again, Jones has a slow moving story, getting into specific details of her characters. In this story, you hear about Aria Jackson. When she was small, she was in a car accident with her family that had devastating, life long effects on her.
There's something about Tayari Jones's writing that really works for me; the stories she's telling are not always especially captivating, but her prose always packs an emotional punch. The Untelling, her second novel, explores how the relationships between its protagonist, Aria, and her mother and older sister have never really recovered from a devastating car crash which killed both Aria's father and her baby sister. When Aria, now twenty-five, suspects that she is pregnant, the secrets that th...
i have only read 2 of her novels--this is the second--but i can safely call myself a tayari jones fan. hers is the type of voice i looked for when i stayed in the "african-american fiction" section of borders' book store; what i still look for in the library books that have the lil red, yellow, & green sticker in the shape of africa on the spine. i appreciate this narrative that is observant, resonant, poetic and yet lacking in pretense. i liked that the plot elements all seemed realistic and th...