Emily WoofCritiques

I struggled with this book and was unable to read it through to the end. I found it too gloomy, too self-consciously 'arty' for my taste and couldn't care about the characters at all.

Another tricky one to review, because I am not entirely sure how I feel about it. Emily Woof is clearly a talented writer who deserves to be better known, and much of this book covers ground that is very familiar to those of us who grew up in 80s Britain. Framed by a conventional love story, the rest of the book covers a lot of ground, part rites of passages story telling the parallel stories of Ursula and Jerry, two children of very different Newcastle backgrounds, whose love story is constantly frustrated by their incompatible expectations and by the sometimes malign influence of Ursula's grandmother "Ganny Mary", whose background in Padiham, a Lancashire milltown overlooked by Pendle Hill (the one famous for its witches) is explored in some detail. Some of the descriptions, particularly of 80s left wing politics are accurate and often funny, and there are some very striking passages, but the whole is a little uneven and I found my attention wavering at times.

Ursula grows up in a house of mirrors and though she tries to avoid looking at her reflection, she cannot. So it is apt that she is the chameleon of this story, changing her appearance, her style, her clothing, so that as the years pass she seems a different person.
‘The Lightning Tree’ is the twin story of Ursula and Jerry. She lives in Jesmond, a nicer area of Newcastle, and through her childhood she passes close to Jerry, who grows up in a flat at the rougher Byker Wall. When they do meet, there is a connection. Their lives run in parallel, twisting and turning, sometimes together, other times far apart. It is a love story, and an un-love story. How it is to fall in love as an adolescent and then see that love challenged into maturity, changing priorities, changing values, changing circumstances. Jerry, his nose always in a book, goes to Oxford and seems destined for politics. Ursula, less academic, goes to India where she undergoes something of a ‘Marabar Caves’ experience which is not really explained and which I still didn’t understand at the end of the book.
Interwoven with Ursula and Jerry’s stories is that of Ursula’s Ganny Mary, her rural Lancashire upbringing, and how her life was affected by the death of her father and the change in her mother Annie who had her own ‘Marabar Caves’ experience, up Pendle Hill in Lancashire.
There’s no doubting the energy in this book, but I did find the storyline confusing, there are so many surplus characters who we never really engage with, and Ganny Mary never ages. It is an enigmatic book, but one which I struggled to really grasp. A small aside – I love the cover, but then I do love trees!
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Emily Woof's first novel depends on her characters to make the story interesting to the reader as there is not much of a plot to follow. Katherine, a former dancer and now a wife and mother, is the daughter of David and May Freeman, neither of whom have paid much attention to their children. David's world is wrapped up in sustaining and enlarging the Broughton Foundation, a place for struggling artists, especially poets, to be supported and encouraged as they struggle to complete their first works. May is determined to separate herself from her roles as a wife and a mother so she can continue to believe she lives the life of an "independent" woman.

David is enamoured with art and artists, and his life is consumed with fund raising, and with his belief in the importance art should assume in each person's life. Unfortunately this does not extend to his interest in his daughter as a dancer, and she spends much of the book in introspection and in reacting against this inability of her father to value her life. She ends up in an affair with one of her father's artists and comes close to ruining her own marriage as well as her lover's marriage. Finally she comes to terms with her worth to herself and her family as her father is dying.

The book is engaging in its portrayal of the art world and the emotional turmoil to a child when their father or mother cannot make themselves emotionally available, but all in all the characters seem so self absorbed as to make them unsympathetic and in the end one did not care that much about their fates.

I really, really had wanted to love this book but it just wasn't anything near what I hoped it would be. The story starts with Katherine Freeman and introducing her life as it is and her parents and husband. What she does and loves and her relationship with her husband. It moves between that and her father, his life and relationships and then her mother. Every now and then its the husband and child.

There wasn't any big pull in the story, after a while we have some excitement when she longs for something that could ruin her whole family life and spill over into her fathers. There is also a revelation with a secret her father has had and the potential for the story to erupt but it didn't come. I thought the slow buildup and link to the family was due to a big plot that was just taking a while to get into but sadly it wasn't to be.

The book is fairly easy to read but I didn't connect with any of the characters and felt it was lacking although the potential I felt was there. Only a 2/5 for me.

I love Emily''s peformances as an actor, and was excited to see that she had written a first novel.

Beautifully written - just like poetry (which is what the book's main theme is) each word was carefully crafted and chosen. Excellent character development and story.

David Freeman has struggled to promote his poetry foundation in Northern England. His daughter, Katherine, attends one of his fundraising events in London and meets Stephen Jericho -- one of the artists in resident.

This novel explores love, loss and fidelity.

David is struggling to maintain his faltering poetry foundation, while his daughter is adrift after giving up her life as a dancer to become a wife and mother. The two have a distant and tense relationship, made worse by David's long-held secret and Katherine's new affair with David's favorite young poet, married-with-children Stephen Jericho.

The affair awakens a new passion in them both, leading Stephen to creative productivity and Katherine to a new sense of self. Meanwhile, David is diagnosed with cancer and must devote himself even more whole-heartedly to finding a wealthy benefactor for the Foundation, which pulls him even farther from his family.

Woof's writing is sparse, her emotions buried deep under the surface of her characters' stiff outer personalities. The story here was not wildly compelling, but the characters' rich inner worlds and tumultuous ups and downs did make for a moving drama of love and family. I guess the plot doesn't matter so much, if the characters can carry the tale.½

It took me quite a while to finish this book, and often times I felt as though it wouldn't even be worth finishing. However, by the final third of the story, it drew me in a bit more and I finally began to care somewhat about what would happen to the characters and how the story would resolve, which is why I ended up giving it three stars instead of two. Much of the book seemed to me tedious and unfocused, and it really took a long time to get the story moving. The first third was pretty dreadful; the main character, Katherine, was so dreary and miserable, it was difficult for me to care about her or where the story might go. In fact a lot of the book is dreary and miserable, which doesn't necessarily make for an unreadable novel, but there didn't seem to be enough in the story to compensate for that and compel the reader to carry on and find out where it's leading. I felt as though too much time was spent in describing characters and what was driving them; again, not in and of itself a bad thing, but in this case, it's hard for me to articulate, but it was almost as though they were being introduced repeatedly throughout the novel, the style was descriptive and didn't seem to be propelling the story, just explaining their background a little bit at a time, over and over again. At any rate, it wasn't a terrible book, but it wasn't exactly a pleasure to read, and wasn't very rewarding either, even though it got a bit better towards the end.

Initially I didn't think I was going to like this book. The writing seemed primitive and a little disjointed. However I did become engaged and eventually enjoyed it thoroughly. It was well written. The relationship between David and his daughter was cleverly constructed and realistic. David's wife appeared frustratingly long suffering and it would have been interesting to develop her character in the book. The emotional ending took me by surprise and I found my eyes filling with tears, not a bad thing for a story!!

I've been mulling over what to say about this book for some time. I'm afraid it inspires me to say very little. I did not engage with any of the characters, and for much of the book the message seems to be "If you get married you give up everything you once were, and life becomes mundane". When dealing with such often-visited subject matter as extra-marital affairs, the author needs to offer something fresh, or there is little point in going there.
I also felt there was a problem with focus. The book seems to be about everyone, and therefore little is really said about anyone. Woof also needs to focus more on her London geography - Katherine and Steven's walk around the city was utterly impossible in places.
In all, not a satisfying read, but it passes the time.

This was an early reviewers review book. Spoilers abound. I wasn't very interested. Woman with difficult parents, has affair, backs off, goes back to dancing; husband gives a little too. The writing is OK. It is a little intrusive in style. I don't think that the author made the main character very interesting & her problems weren't very involving. The father had unresolved homoerotic impulses & I'm not sure what the point was.

I received this book through the Early Reviewers program at LibraryThing. I found it difficult to get through and the characters not very engaging. The plot was uninteresting and I think touched on too many themes for one book. I do not think that the author's writing style is anything spectacular. In short, if I hadn't been required to write a review of this title, I wouldn't have bothered to finish reading it.

I truly wanted to enjoy The Whole Wide Beauty by Emily Woof, but was disappointed in its lack of substance. The characters were two-dimensional and failed to engage me; I never ended up caring about them. The plot seemed rather shallow and I felt that writing in regards to the affair fell flat, where it really could have added necessary heat, passion, and tension to the story. I also found it rather irritating that the author chose to write all dialog between characters without quotation marks. This was annoying and took away from the flow of the story, in my opinion. I’m not going to pass this one on to my friends or recommend it to others.

I received this book as an uncorrected proof and wasn't sure what to expect. I thoroughly enjoyed it and was hooked from the start.

The story is an old one of adultery and aging seen through the eyes of different generations but the relationships are real and dealt with sensitively.

It is apparently Emily Woolf's first book and I can't wait for more from her.½

I really did not care for this book. The plot was weak, and I never felt a connection to the characters. In fact, I didn't much like the characters at all. The main character, Katherine, was so quick to take up an affair with her father's protege, and carried on the entire time like it was her right to have this affair. But perhaps it ran in the family, since her uncle was living with another woman while her aunt was left in an asylum. Ugh. Infiedelity, mental illness, closeted homosexuality - not the types of themes I want to read about, and particularly not all in one book.

Overall, I found the story boring, and I didn't look forward to reading it. If I hadn't agreed to write a review as part of the Early Reviewers program, I most likely would have stopped reading this book about 50 pages in. It was definitely not my cup of tea.

Finally, from a grammatical point of view, I could not understand what was with the lack of quotation marks around dialogue. It made it so difficult to read!½

The Whole Wide Beauty by Emily Woof is a tale of a family, especially the daughter and father though the mother and two sons are in the story but not clear characters. Thus, it really is a story of the father and daughter. The father, a director of a poetry foundation, constantly struggles to find funding to keep the foundation going and ultimately to build a library to house the foundation’s poetry, some of which is quite valuable. He also struggles with his personal demons, not the least of which is a life-long attraction to young men, though he loves his wife and apparently always has. The daughter, on the other hand, does not understand her father’s poetry; it is like a foreign language to her poetic emotion means nothing to her. She lives to dance, as much as her father lives for poetry, she lives to the movement and expression of the dance. She has been rebellious, but when we meet her she is a wife and mother who have no dance in her life, living with an attorney husband who seems a good man, but we never get to know much about him.
The event changing the status quo is the affair which develops between the daughter and a poet, a poet married with two children, a protégé’ of her father and his foundation, a poet struggling with writer’s block to complete an epic about his family’s escape from Eastern Europe and the struggles they endured – and the love they had. The affair becomes a love affair extending to her traveling to America to be with him when he has a grant to work in the United States. Like all affairs this one has the deceit, paranoia and guilt all of which overwhelms the love eventually, though he does break the writer’s block and she apparently finds her roots as a dancer. The culminating moment is her revelation of the affair.
The father becomes ill with cancer, does not do well with treatment and becomes weakened but not without a rapprochement with his daughter. The lovers meet again when an event, a sculpting event, not poetry or dancing, celebrates the foundation finally getting on a solid financial footing through the efforts of an uncle who himself has his failings. The lovers meet with their families and suddenly the daughter understands poetry and goes on to do her dancing.
This book was less than I expected. I envisioned a book speaking to the arts, poetry and dance. I expected the characters to have emotions and past lives effecting those emotions. The author tells us what people are doing, feeling and thinking at any moment. Dialogue is not presented as dialogue, but a running series of sentences in the stead of dialogue. The characters populating this story fail to become full people, most of what we know we are told, with the characters not becoming real. The story has strong themes, love between father and daughter, the struggles all people have with the “dark” side of ourselves, communication between people. Until the last few chapters I struggled with this book, it seemed to drag interminably.

I give this book two stars. The story had strengths, but the writing lacked the power to tell the tale.

I was pleased to receive this book as an early reviewer, but began to have my doubts as early as page 24, and then 26, and yet again 29. I admit I'm biased in favor of British novelists, but one doesn't expect grammatical errors from same; and so to come across "he was about the same age as her," and "five years older than him," and "all younger than him" in the space of 5 pages is disconcerting, to say the least, breaking not only the suspension of disbelief but the desire to like the book.

It was filled with declarative sentences; I was being told, not shown, to put it in the old canard. And the plot was hackneyed: the father, a closeted gay; the daughter's affair with her father's protege...
It was disappointing, to put it mildly.½

While I wanted desperately to enjoy this read, I had a very hard time doing so. There are some beautifully written moments, some interesting characters, and overall a well structured plot, but there were too many other problems with the book for me to really enjoy it. I felt that the plot was very predictable and characters were sadly underdeveloped. Beyond this, personal bias definitely stepped in. I rarely enjoy books that are filled with infidelity, especially when the infidelity ends up being drawn as a positive experience for the characters. Not only was the majority of this plot woven around the affair of the main character, but other characters had affairs, too! Sure, this is realistic, people have affairs, but this one was not romantic, sexy, dramatic, or even dangerous. None of the grit that infidelities often have in novels, and none of the guilt in the end. Overall, this story was so lackluster I won't be passing it on to my friends.½

Overall, I enjoyed this book as a debut novel. Woof has good technical knowledge of how to write, but it does not seem to come as naturally as it does to other authors. I liked the aspects of father/daughter relationships, but I found that the characters were largely undeveloped. I did not feel attached to any of the characters, and the absolute disjoint between Katherine and her own son left me confused. Katherine was probably one of the most "blank" characters I've ever seen; she is supposedly going through all this self-discovery, but the lack of development impedes the reader's ability to empathize.

I received this as a LTER book and found it difficult to get into at the start; I read and finished 2 other books whilst slowly getting involved in the story!
Once I got past the first 100 pages the pace picked up with some interesting ideas and characters but then I felt the ending was rushed. I believe Kathryn has the strongest voice and story but would have loved to know more about May and Adam who both seem to have a peripheral roles. We seem to focus on the selfish and self-absorbed characters rather than those who offer support and care. An extra 100 pages might have allowed us to engage with the characters in a fully satisfying way rather than feeling slightly short-changed.
The book is underpinned with an exploration of expressing ourselves: through words; through dance; through creativity; and through passion. This does add an extra dimension and I do feel the author writes well. This is a promising debut but I feel it could have been excellent with a little tweaking and drawing out of ideas.
Being a pedant I was disturbed by the inaccuracies of geography and editing. The book was a proof copy but I hope some of the glaring faults can be sorted:
Back cover tells us the poetry foundation is in the Lake District but it becomes clear in the book it is Northumberland [other side of the country] ... maybe mixing real life as the author's father did do a similar job to David in the Lakes;
May [in her 70's] is regularly doing round trips of 4 hours driving [nr Alnwick to Carlisle] to teach - I hope she is well paid; and
when David is on the train a soldier gets on at Wigan they stay together until Crewe and then they are back at Wigan again![to name a few!]
Poor editing is a personal bugbear but not a criticism of the author. I will read more books by this author as I feel she can create intriguing characters and I did find the second half of the book very enjoyable.

This is ultimately the story of a difficult relationship between a father and his daughter, although there are many different strands running through this novel.

David Freeman is an intensely focused businessman, responsible for a poetry foundation in Northumberland, which is struggling due to lack of funding. His daughter, Katherine, has always had a hard time fitting in, particularly with her father who had never seemed to understand her. As a dancer, she finds a way to express herself through that medium, but she gives up dance and settles down with her husband and son. However, she then meets poet Stephen Jericho through her father, and commences an affair with him. Together they appear to find an intensity and passion that is missing from their own marriages.

This book has quite a stark prose and I found it to be very well-written. Emily Woof has produced an accomplished debut novel, which I enjoyed reading very much, and which encompasses many different feelings and emotions. This is not a book with a plot as such, rather one which looks at relationships and the power of feelings within families, and of all-consuming love. I came away from the read feeling very satisfied by it, and I would definitely read another book by this author if she writes one.

This book was an easy, quick read; however, I couldn't get into the plot or characters. Just as I was getting interested in the affair between Stephen and Katerine, the story veered off in a completely different direction and left me hanging. It seems as though the book could have been developed into so much more. I would have loved more exploration of the relationship between David (father) and Katherine (daughter). I had hoped for much more out of this novel, but sadly it did not provide a lot of enjoyment.½

A surprisingly good book. Surprising, because the back-cover copy led me to believe it was about a woman’s passionate affair with a poet. It is about that, but it is also much more. It gets off to somewhat of a slow start, introducing lots of peripheral characters. At least they seemed to be peripheral, until the novel blossomed into an examination of all the linked characters and their loves and lives. The author does a great job portraying the diverse characters and examining their motivations and desires. A very enjoyable and satisfying novel.

I too wanted to like this book more than I did. I found Ms. Woof's writing to be engaging with a beautiful descriptive quality. The story & characters however, seemed flat and Ms. Woof did not succeed in depicting the complex emotional depth of human interactions in the relationships she attempted to describe. Difficult interactions between the characters were suddenly resolved with little explanation to tell the reader how they got from A to Z. The relationship between Katherine and her father for instance, while described throughout the book as selfishly one sided, in the end, abruptly turns around in a situation not consistent with the intransigence of life long parental narcissism I felt Ms. Woof attempted more than she was able to deliver in this somewhat brief novel. The ending seemed as though it came straight from Hollywood and I felt a little sad because this book could have been so much more.