This is my first book since February that is:
-not an e-book
-not in English
-not a reread

This is also my Cunnigham's fourth book. Nothing will ever beat Home at the end of the World and Hours, but it was okay. He has very similar themes in all of his books. This story follows one family in the span of 100 years and while certain plotlines are good, I found most of them really boring, especially in the second half. Characters are somewhat interesting and my favorite is Cassandra the drag queen, but overall the whole story could've been better. I also really like Cunningham's writing style. ( )

En 1950, Constantine Stassos, un trabajador inmigrante griego, se casa con Mary Cuccio, una adolescente italoamericana, y juntos tienen tres hijos: Susan, una belleza ambiciosa, Billy, un brillante homosexual, y Zoe, una niña salvaje. Con los años, una maraña de anhelos enredados, amor, deficiencias y sueños no cumplidos se desarrolla a medida que el matrimonio de Mary y Constantine fracasa y Susan, Billy y Zoe se van para crear sus propias familias. Zoe cría a un niño con la ayuda de un travesti, Billy hace una vida con otro hombre, y Susan cría a un hijo concebido en secreto, cada uno extendiendo el significado de la familia y el amor. Con el poder de una tragedia griega, la historia se construye con un crescendo desgarrador, que permite vislumbrar la vida contemporánea que hará eco en el corazón de los próximos años.

If I'm counting correctly, this is the tenth one-star rating I've made recently. Others have been one-star or star-and-a-half. It would appear I hate reading. I do not! I've just picked books I wound up not liking.
Trigger warnings: domestic violence, incest, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, cheating, incest between first cousins framed as sexual experimentation, death of a parent, racism, suicide by drowning, a dozen pointless explicit sex scenes
SPOILERS. This was required reading in one of my college English classes. I was sixteen, and the professor said, "If you're in my class, I view you as an adult. I will treat you as an adult. We will be reading books with adult content in them." Every single book we read had graphic sex scenes and violence within families, or in one case discord within a marriage and the accidental death of a child as a result of roughhousing with older children. My professor was a conceited, arrogant weirdo. He picked these books out. I suspect things about him, now, as an adult. It's been half my life ago as of this writing, but I'm wondering. He liked to be listened to, but not have discussions. Unless it was to steer someone to his POV. The class sat in a circle and analyzed this book the closest out of all the books he'd assigned. If someone seemed uncomfortable with the repetitive, gratuitous sex scenes, he'd shame them in class at length. I found the scenes exciting at the time. I didn't have a lot of life experience. Now, as an adult, I wondered how I'd interpret the book.

The story being told in this book does not really begin until page 270 (yes, two hundred and seventy) or so. Zoe, a woman dying of AIDS, is co-parenting her son with Cassandra, a woman the author refers to as a drag queen but I interpreted as a trans woman. The author mentions House of Xtraveganza in his dedication, which is a ball house and is examined at length in the documentary "Paris is Burning," which is a fantastic film. Cassandra could be either. I'm still going back and forth on it. Cassandra was my favorite character. Zoe is close to her brother Will, who has been secure in his homosexuality for years and fallen in love at thirty-five. I mention his homosexuality because the book makes such a goddamn big deal about it. The previous 270 pages could have been used as filler paragraphs, chapter transitions, and a few sentences here and there: references to their violent, tyrannical dad, their klepto, high-status mother, their dissatisfied sister who is cheating on her husband, who she literally married right out of high school. But this is written as a family saga, so it's gonna drag...on and on...I'm realizing I don't like family sagas.

"Behind Closed Doors" by Susan Sloan had its first hundred pages as backstory, too, and did a better job of it. It also had family violence as a major theme, and a few sex scenes, and cheating, and the characters were also Catholic, and it was a family saga. So, on the surface they had several things in common. Back to this book. The sex scenes in this book are repetitive, explicit for no real reason, a huge turn-off, and add nothing to the story. Nor do the repeated domestic violence scenes. The incest doesn't add anything, either. Cunningham spends pages and pages on these three themes, when a paragraph here and there would be much more effective. The prose is incredibly flowery and purple. There's tons of useless narrative passages that increase as the book goes on. It's like the author didn't know what to do, so he padded out his word count.

Years after I read this book for the first time, one passage in particular continued to stay with me. I had associated it with this book even after I'd largely forgotten the book itself. There is a...sad beauty, I'd describe it, to the sentence, "When the time came to start hating them...Andrew would be the last." (Cunningham 339). I'd looked forward to that passage for that one sentence, and was utterly dismayed to not find it in the book for awhile. I'd begun to think it was in another book altogether when wham, I turned a page and there it was! What delight, at realizing this was the book that had it. I kept reading because I wanted to finish the book. For some reason, Ben dies by drowning, with the implication that it's better to be dead than not heterosexual? WOW. A Bury Your Gays, Teenager Edition, written by a gay man who's won awards for his writing. I know of several out gay men who have this trope in their writing, but it's so harmful and stupid. And Ben was in an incestuous relationship with his cousin Jamal? Seriously WHY. I was so glad when the book ended. ( )

A bit weak. ( )

Flesh and Blood is the story of a complicated family that started with the marriage at a very early age of Greek immigrant, Constantine, and Italian immigrant, Mary. They eventually have three children, Susan, Billy and Zoe, while Constantine struggles to make a living in construction on Long Island. Susan is the golden child over whom Constantine obsesses and whose presence makes her increasingly uncomfortable; Billy is academically brilliant, an outlier and the object of his father's frequent physical and verbal assaults; Zoe is the quiet child who observes her family from a quiet distance.

Cunningham deftly captures the dynamics of this group of individuals, all of whom are alienated from each other at some time for some reason with the mother wringing her hands in the background. The father's disappointment in and disapproval of his son's gay lifestyle is irreparable at an early age. His subsequent violent rages create a distance that can never be bridged. The most sympathetic character for me was the drag queen, Cassandra, with her unwavering loyalty and love at a time when it was most needed. The ending is especially poignant. ( )