clementine
Written on Jul 3, 2019
In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that author Judy Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going somewhere, she paints a vivid portrait of a particular time and place. Through it all, one generation reminds another that life goes on.
- ISBN10 1101875046
- ISBN13 9781101875049
- Publish Date 2 June 2015 (first published 1 January 2015)
- Publish Status Remaindered
- Imprint Knopf Publishing Group
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 416
- Language English
Reviews
Amber (The Literary Phoenix)
Written on Jul 13, 2018
Every character in this book is selfish or unreliable. So many of them feel like carbon copies of one another in slightly different situations. I was bored. I am bored. I pushed my way through this book wanting to love it... and just didn't.
When I read the summary on this book, I thought it was going to be more about the airplane crashes and how they affected the lives of a handful of townsfolk. The crashes set a backdrop, but for the most part, this is about a variety of messy love stories. I didn't care for it in particular because it's not my genre, but I listened dutifully to the whole thing.
The one thing I felt went well in this book was the setting. Judy Blume does and excellent job of catching the chill of the descent and the hard edges of the restaurants. Where the characters feel flat and annoying (to me), the world around them at the least felt alive.
I do think that in the right hands, this book would be very much enjoyed. I'm not the best candidate for a book like this, but I do think that people who like the slow wind up of fiction and messy romances will enjoy it.
Whitney @ First Impressions Reviews
Written on Sep 20, 2015
Unfortunately, In The Unlikely Event read like a young adult novel. Blume's book had a grown-up topic, but the simplicity and continual reminders of what happened previously made it repetitive and a little annoying screaming Y.A.
The novel also had a lot of characters and was told from numerous points of view, and while this was a good idea in theory, it became a bit confusing and had to go back several times to place who the character was. If a person were to read In The Unlikely Event straight through I do not think this would be a problem, but for those like myself who could not read the book in one sitting it could become tedious.
There were four character plots that irked me as well. One was Miri's best friend Natalie who inhibits the souls of one of the crash victims. She becomes obsessed with dance (as was the deceased) and is all a bit schizophrenic. It seemed unnecessary to the story.
The second was the identity and reconnection with Miri's birth father (she was raised in a single parent household). The friction between Father and Daughter added drama to the story and helped with the development of the character and exploration of her family unit but, the author dropped the subplot halfway and was only a deterrent.
Lastly, I really dislike affairs in stories, I believe this is mainly due to the fact that I am personally disgusted by the idea of this magnitude of betrayal. That being said there are not one but two such incidents. One by Miri's boyfriend (with a much older woman I may add) and the second was by Miri's mother Rusty with Natalie's father. If Judy Blume was aiming for a soapbox, she succeeded but it just didn't work for me.
I think In The Unlikely Event had great potential but didn't quite make the mark. If it had focused more on the aftermath instead of small town drama this could have been an okay book but instead it was typecasted into young adult literature and was just all over the place. In other words, it crashed and burned.