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Ebook206 pages3 hours
Improvement: A Novel
By Joan Silber
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this ebook
The national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book about a young single mother living in New York, her eccentric aunt, and the decisions they make that have unexpected implications for the world around them from one of America's most gifted writers of fiction, "our own country's Alice Munro" (The Washington Post).
Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn’t perfect, yet as she visits him throughout his three–month stint at Rikers Island, their bond grows tighter. Kiki, now settled in the East Village after a journey that took her to Turkey and around the world, admires her niece’s spirit but worries that she always picks the wrong man. Little does she know that the otherwise honorable Boyd is pulling Reyna into a cigarette smuggling scheme, across state lines, where he could risk violating probation. When Reyna ultimately decides to remove herself for the sake of her four–year–old child, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them.
A novel that examines conviction, connection, and the possibility of generosity in the face of loss, Improvement is as intricately woven together as Kiki’s beloved Turkish rugs, as colorful as the tattoos decorating Reyna’s body, with narrative twists and turns as surprising and unexpected as the lives all around us. The Boston Globe says of Joan Silber: "No other writer can make a few small decisions ripple across the globe, and across time, with more subtlety and power." Improvement is Silber’s most shining achievement yet.
"Without fuss or flourishes, Joan Silber weaves a remarkably patterned tapestry connecting strangers from around the world to a central tragic car accident. The writing here is funny and down–to–earth, the characters are recognizably fallible, and the message is quietly profound: We are not ever really alone, however lonely we feel." —The Wall Street Journal
Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn’t perfect, yet as she visits him throughout his three–month stint at Rikers Island, their bond grows tighter. Kiki, now settled in the East Village after a journey that took her to Turkey and around the world, admires her niece’s spirit but worries that she always picks the wrong man. Little does she know that the otherwise honorable Boyd is pulling Reyna into a cigarette smuggling scheme, across state lines, where he could risk violating probation. When Reyna ultimately decides to remove herself for the sake of her four–year–old child, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them.
A novel that examines conviction, connection, and the possibility of generosity in the face of loss, Improvement is as intricately woven together as Kiki’s beloved Turkish rugs, as colorful as the tattoos decorating Reyna’s body, with narrative twists and turns as surprising and unexpected as the lives all around us. The Boston Globe says of Joan Silber: "No other writer can make a few small decisions ripple across the globe, and across time, with more subtlety and power." Improvement is Silber’s most shining achievement yet.
"Without fuss or flourishes, Joan Silber weaves a remarkably patterned tapestry connecting strangers from around the world to a central tragic car accident. The writing here is funny and down–to–earth, the characters are recognizably fallible, and the message is quietly profound: We are not ever really alone, however lonely we feel." —The Wall Street Journal
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Reviews for Improvement
Rating: 3.76630434673913 out of 5 stars
4/5
92 ratings9 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I am unsure what all the hype was about....this was an OK book, not the masterpiece that people were expecting.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a great novel. Weaving together the stories of three people with the connecting theme of Turkey and rugs, Silber takes us on a journey as different people who have been connected however loosely go about their lives and find happiness.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The butterfly effect ably displayed in literary form. We start with an aunt, KiKi, who has had a varied life, but is now living fairly close to her neice, Reyna. Reyna has a young son, but visits her boyfriend who is serving a short term at Rikers. When he gets out, he and his friends, hatch a money making scheme, which if discovered could carry serious penalties. Reyna, in a moment of weakness, makes a decision that she later rescinds. This would have a snowball effect on many lives.A decision made by one, leads to a decision by another, and that decision another, and so on and so on. It was extremely interesting to see how these people, and others besides are affected by one decision. Never really thought of it before, but probably should have. While I didn't particularly like, nor dislike any of these characters, I was very caught up in where this was going, how it would end. Decisions we make have consequences, many times outside of our view. Quite interesting to think about, and of course to read about.Very well written, maybe a cautionary tale for our lives as we live them. Definitely s novel that makes one think. I love the connections here, and found this to be truly novel read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I really liked the gentleness of the narrative--I'm so tired of muscular prose and feeling jerked here and there by the weird combination currently favored in American fiction of brutal realism and rigorous hitting of plot points. I wasn't entirely convinced of the characters but I appreciated the truths they collectively conveyed about love and conflict.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I had heard about this author and given her listing of well received books I thought I would read her newest. It was written as many books are these days with a linkage among the characters. It traverses time and location. It is well written and each of the characters and their piece in the big picture held my interest. The story eventually comes back to Reyna, a single mom in New York and her aunt Kikki. They are the main characters but the linkage takes us to Turkey, Berlin, etc. There were aspects to the actions of the characters that didn't always ring true for me but the book held my interest and sometime I will read her other books that were nominated for National Book Awards.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This book is well-written, I just didn't care about the characters. Most of them didn't feel real to me or particularly differentiated from each other. This is possibly too subtle a novel for me.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Silber's newest 'novel' is more of a collection of interconnected stories--a pattern she has used before, most successfully in my favorite work of hers, Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories. Reyna is a young single NYC mother whose current boyfriend, Boyd, is serving time in Rikers Island Prison for petty theft. He follows the straight and narrow for a while after getting out but soon becomes involved in a cigarette smuggling scheme that ends in a tragedy--a tragedy that is indirectly blamed on Reyna. Kiki, Reyna's aunt, has an interesting past. While travelling in Turkey as a young woman, she fell in love with the culture and decided to stay, marrying a rug seller who, due to political upheaval, soon took her from Istanbul to live on a farm--a life for which she was unsuited. She came back to New York after a few years, bringing with her a collection of Turkish rugs. Individual chapters focus on Reyna, Kiki, and Boyd, and also on the friends involved in the cigarette smuggling scheme, including a young man named Claude; his sister Lynette (Boyd's former girlfriend and an eyebrow shaping artist); and Darisse, a hospice worker, who is Claude's latest and last girlfriend. A series of other intriguing characters-- Teddy, a truck driver who can't seem to quit his ex-wife; and three German artifact hunters, Bruno, Dieter, and Steffi, and, years later, Steffi's daughter Monika and her husband Julian--fill in the gaps. Silber does a fine job of playing Six Degrees of Separation while exploring the way that people and events can change our lives forever. As for the title, all of the characters are seeking to improve their lives in some manner, whether it is through a get rich scheme, finding the right man, doing what's best for a child, hiding the past, or making amends.I enjoyed this book and find I am still thinking about it and appreciating new things about it even days after I finished reading it. I would still rank Ideas of Heaven as my favorite by Silber; I liked the way the individual stories there were set in different places and time periods yet all linked by blood and faith. But Improvements is coming in at a close second.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved this—delightful, a little profound but not obsessively so. Actually it made me think of Prezi—remember that, the presentation software that everybody wanted to play with a few years back because they were so sick of Powerpoint, how you could make it swoop in and out and go from macro to micro and back again? I hated Prezi, it made me dizzy. But this book is what Prezi wished it could be. Silber uses these beautiful little declarative sentences to paint a whole mural, and it's just neat how she does it—plus entertaining and very sweet. This is a morally decent novel and god knows we need more of those right now.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Story telling at its best. Really enjoyed this.