Kait ✨
Written on Jun 27, 2020
Also, my heart feels a bit broken for Teddy.
Ursula Todd's brother Teddy is an old man trying to come to grips with his post-War life and with a modern world and family. Switching back and forth in time between memories of his childhood and his present, Teddy is an oblivious husband, a rueful father. He never quite got over the War and part of him never adjusted to having a future. Would-be poet, heroic pilot, husband, father, and grandfather, Teddy navigates the perils and progress of a rapidly changing world; his greatest challenge is living in a future he never expected to have. --
- ISBN10 0316176532
- ISBN13 9780316176538
- Publish Date 5 May 2015 (first published 1 May 2015)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Little, Brown & Company
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 480
- Language English
Reviews
Also, my heart feels a bit broken for Teddy.
brokentune
Written on Feb 14, 2016
I was so bored with A God in Ruins that I skipped the second half of the book and advanced to the end of the book.
There is a twist at the end of the story, but it was too little and too late, and I had kind of predicted it anyway.
As with Life After Life, it was not the writing that put me off. Kate Atkinson clearly has a talent for writing beautiful prose. My problem was again with the plot.
I found it very hard to get invested in the story of Teddy, the brother of Ursula from Life After Life.
A God in Ruins is not one of those books that is driven by plot, and so it relies on its characters being interesting enough to keep reading. While Teddy's daughter, Viola, could have provided this interest, Teddy didn't. I get that Teddy was a representation of the many WW2 pilots who returned from the war to lead very ordinary lives without fuss and much excitement, and I appreciate that Teddy is a tribute to those men. However, I would rather read about these men from non-fiction sources than in a fictional environment.
As for the point of the book that events and lives are interlinked and a change in one results in a ripple effect that will change others, I believe this came across quite well in Life After Life and did not need the additional elaboration of Teddy's story in A God in Ruins.