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What About the Taylors????, in general, was difficult to get through; the reasons why I will discuss further on in the review. However, there were a few aspects to this story that helped boost its appeal to me. The first of these was the style of the book; the grouping of short stories rather than a single text made me less inclined to push the book aside. After reading a single story, I could reflect and just pause without worrying about forgetting where I was in the story. It gave the book a leisurely feeling, which matches the reminiscent aspect of the stories themselves.
The other facet that I somewhat enjoyed was the change in narration. I thought it was clever to use different boys to represent the different ideas and characteristics that the Taylors may have had. The family being so spread out and large, of course there were bound to be different class distinctions, even within the family. I though that the idea of showing it through the boys was nice; however, I thought that the execution was poorly done. The voices of all the characters in the stories were the same. The speech patterns and thoughts were so similar there was no way to separate them and it made it harder to remember what happened to which character. Also, the narrator of each specific story was not made clear at the beginning of each story, so in the beginning, I thought all of the stories would be narrated by a single person and I wasn’t aware of any change until the narrator was addressed as someone else by another character.
Unlike the very few things that I liked about What About the Taylors????, there were quite a few things that I did not enjoy about the book. This included the typos in the book and the lack of direction in the book. With the grammar, I understood that the southern vernacular allowed for changes to how English was spoken, so I didn’t have a problem with that; in fact, it added a little authenticity to the setting. However, I couldn’t ignore the typos that were scattered throughout the book, especially because it was so short in length and could be reread in a few hours to edit the text. A number of these were redundant words; for example, “Cleo and Keisha started to cry, and even Jeremy’s eyes even started to water up” (26). Simple mistakes like this really detracted from the stories trying to be told.
The other main problem with this book was the lack of a plot to the story. The book is fictional, but is written to mimic a family biography; there was problem to resolve in the story, nothing was a stake with any of the characters. Because there was so little moving the story along, I trouble moving along with each story. The only thing that I could connect between the stories were some characters and the fact that this was one specific family, which was made apparent in each of the stories.
What About the Taylors????, by E.S. Fuller, had real potential to become an interesting look at a family through the generations, in its daily life. However, the lack a guiding plot and evident lack of editing, left my opinion of this book rather low. I couldn’t get interested in the characters because their lives had no meanings to the overall story being told. Because of this missing connection, I would rate What About the Taylors????, by E.S. Fuller, a 2 out of 4.
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