Sean Evers

I DNFed this at 58 percent and stopped reading after "The Teacup." At that point I didn't care anymore about the secret life of objects.

One good thing about cleaning out my virtual TBR pile is for me to look back and wonder what the hell was I thinking when I bought some of the books I did. This book was definitely one of those moments for me. I still don't get what the author was trying in this collection of vignettes that are about the "object" in the title of the chapter you read.

This collection is boring. There's no other word for it. We just move from object to object and there's no sense of anything holding this together. If you don't realize it the author, Dawn Raffel is telling the reader about objects that she has.

I only really enjoyed one story and that was "The Mug." It whetted my appetite for the rest of the stories because I stupidly assumed the rest of them would be as moving as that one. Not so much. Instead of the secret life of objects, we were actually reading more about the secret life of the people using the objects.

I read "The Secret Life of Dresses" a few years ago and loved how the author actually had the dresses have a personality and tell a story about the women that wore them. I wish that the author had done that here, it would have been interesting to have the story told from the object's point of view. Instead we get nameless narrators who at times sound cold/indifferent or just bland. I didn't get any emotional response for the most part while reading this.

The flow was awful too. Some of these stories are just five sentences, some are several pages. The illustrations at the beginning of each object's story were cute and added visual interest, but not enough for me to keep reading this.

I wish that the author had just written a memoir about her life and her family since she kept zig-zagging all over the place and going back to certain people that are mentioned earlier (such as her mother, stepfather, and grandparents) it just adds to the overall confusion that I had while reading this.… (plus d'informations)