I’m not sure what to say about this book. I’m not sure what the point of the story was, or even what the genre would be called - some fantasy, some history, and a lot of strange characters. The writing itself, however, was very good. I kept hoping the ending would be revelatory, but it was not. ( )

Bertha Truitt and Leviticus Sprague meet in a graveyard. Both of them are new arrivals in the small city of Salford, north of Boston, Massachusetts, early in the 20th century, and people are not sure who they are or where they are from. Bertha has a clear plan though - she is going to build a candlepin bowling alley, one which is open to all customers, women as well as men. She hires staff to run the bowling alley. She marries the handsome black doctor and gives birth to daughter Minna. So starts this family saga set over several decades, with the bowling alley taking its place at the centre of the lives of people who come to work and play there.

There are many more characters with mysterious back stories, and the bowling alley and becomes the setting for a lots of twists and turns, including battles over the ownership of the building and business and other family disputes, and complicated dramas. I really enjoyed the ambiguity, the mixture of dry humour and real sadness, and the evocation of the story's small town setting. ( )

This is a very strange-feeling novel. It spans a period from the 1900s through the 1970s, and you could describe it as a family saga of sorts, but it's not really like any family saga I've ever read. Or like anything else, for that matter.

It starts with a woman in a graveyard. She has a bag containing a bowling ball, a pin, and fifteen pounds of gold. If she has a past before that day, she won't talk about or acknowledge it. Instead, she starts a new life by opening a candlepin bowling alley, an establishment which remains somewhere at the heart of the story for the rest of its pages.

Do we ever find out what her backstory is and how she got to that graveyard and why she had that bag? Nope, not really. We do learn a thing or two about her past, and can maybe guess at some more of it, but it's all sort of... oblique. As are a lot of things about the book, including the writing style, which is also not quite like anything else I've read, in some way I have a weird amount of trouble putting my finger on. It's not hard to read, mind you. And it's good. You can absolutely tell McCracken knows what she's doing and is firmly in control of her prose. But it's hard to feel like you quite know where you are with it.

That's also true of the narrative itself, which was never quite what I was expecting. Characters you think are going to be the focus for a good long time will suddenly die in bizarre circumstances, or leave town for decades, and you'll find yourself sliding into someone else's POV for a while, and then back out of it again, not all at once, but still before you've had time to feel completely at home with it.

Ultimately, though... it works. It was certainly an interesting reading experience, and, in the end, not an unsatisfying one. Somehow. I'm genuinely kind of impressed with McCracken for pulling it off, despite how much of the novel I spent trying to decide whether it was, in fact, working for me or not. ( )

A weird and wonderful family saga centered around a bowling alley. Lots of bowling and great characters. A fun read. ( )

This started out interesting enough, with a woman found unconscious in a cemetery. It definitely sounded like my kind of read, something a bit whimsical and quirky.
But I started to lose interest in it about a quarter through. I didn't want to give it up so fast, maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind for it. So I moved on to something else (a faster paced, fun read) and then came back to this one. I gave it another try but in the end, decided I did not care enough to find out what happened to any of the characters in the book. It didn't work for me, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't for you. There's some great writing in here. ( )