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Read Patron Saint Of Liars (2003)

Patron Saint of Liars (2003)

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Rating
3.72 of 5 Votes: 1
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ISBN
1841150509 (ISBN13: 9781841150505)
Language
English
Publisher
harpercollins publishers

Patron Saint Of Liars (2003) - Plot & Excerpts

Ann Patchett’s debut novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, is a beautifully written story about people, secrets, and lies. The book’s title intrigued me; “Patron Saint of Liars” – a conflict between virtue and dishonesty. Patchett’s writing is quiet and compelling as she shares the story of Rose Clinton, and how her lies affected her life and the lives of those around her. After three years of marriage, Rose Clinton finds herself pregnant. Unsatisfied with her life, and questioning her love for her husband, she runs away leaving just a short note of apology to her unsuspecting husband and mother. She ends up in Habit, Kentucky at St. Elizabeth’s Home for Unwed Mothers. Of course Rose isn’t “unwed”, but the book is about lies and liars. Most of the residents at St. Elizabeth are liars. They are hiding their pregnancies, so that they can give up their children for adoption and then slip back into their lives. Unlike the other girls at St. Elizabeth, Rose does not give up her baby. In the end, she marries Son, the home’s handyman, and keeps her daughter Cecelia (Sissy). Rose, Son and Cecelia live on the grounds of St. Elizabeth where Rose takes over the role of cook with Sister Evangeline. Sissy grows up believing that Son is her father. Rose is a distant mother, but Sissy has the Sisters at St. Elizabeth’s and the residents as surrogates. It is a strange life – one where people are transient, moving in for this secret part of their lives and moving on after their babies are born. The novel is told in three segments; the first narrated by Rose, the second by Son, and the third by Cecelia. Through their distinct voices we learn about them and their secrets. I won’t go into plot details. The plot seems almost a delivery device for a character study, and by quietly sharing the characters experiences, the reader is given a glimpse into their being. This is not a story about Rose, or Son or Sissy. It is not a story about a family; the reader will find that Rose, Son and Sissy do not live as a close family unit. It is a story about truth and lies; about taking responsibility and about running away from it. It is a story about how our actions and our shame control our futures. Neither Rose nor Son lives the life they imagined. Each is held captive by their secrets and their losses. Patchett writes with grace and restraint. She weaves metaphors and symbols into her story without using them to smack the reader on the head. She doesn’t provide a nice tidy ending where everyone lives happily ever after, but she does leave us with a sense of hope and a sense of healing. This review is intentionally vague. I don’t want to tell you about the book, I just want to compel you to read it. It is, in my opinion, a beautiful piece of literature. I think that because of its subject matter The Patron Saint of Liars will appeal more to women readers than to men, but I recommend it to anyone who is interested in a quiet and thought-provoking character study.

This was the first novel I've read by Ann Patchett, but it felt strangely familiar and I kept wondering if I'd read it before. I don't think I had, but maybe I'd read another book set in a home for unmarried mothers. Or maybe it is that I've read a number of books where a character walks out on family and home because s/he decides they are living the "wrong life", as Rose does here. (I'd just read another novel, Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum, where a central character does just that.)I had mixed feelings about the novel. Patchett's writing style is beautiful, and there's a startlingly good love scene near the beginning, which shows that it is possible to write good sex scenes despite those 'bad sex' awards which put writers off trying.However, I found the plot hard to believe, and was disappointed by the decision to write a third of the book through the eyes of each of the main three characters. This means that Patchett distances herself from Rose early on and we never learn the reason for the character's coldness towards her daughter, or her desperation to spend her whole life cooking. I also felt as if the book doesn't really address the question of how pregnant girls in these types of homes were treated - the nuns seem to be surrounded with a sort of fog of cosiness, with much of the book centred in the kitchens where an eccentric elderly sister and then Rose prepare delicious food. I'd like to have seen more about the mass of girls in the background preparing to hand over their babies.

What do You think about Patron Saint Of Liars (2003)?

I hate books like this. Ones that start out so promising, and then crap out halfway through. Like they get lost in the swirl of it all and then just flush themselves down the toilet in despair. At it's most basic, The Patron Saint of Liars is about leaving. The blurb on the back cover of the novel is misleading. It makes it seem like Rose is the main character, when in fact, we lose touch with her halfway through, when she becomes a shadow of the character we've been reading about for 165 pages. It's 1963. She has come to Habit, Kentucky to a home for unwed mothers run by Catholic nuns, because she has found herself pregnant, but unlike the other girls in the home, she's married. She doesn't love her husband, and only truly realized it when she found herself pregnant with his child. So she leaves. She tells no one where she's going and drives halfway across the country. At St. Elizabeth's she falls into a new life, mostly by accident. I very much liked the Rose part of the novel. She was a troubled character, but in the first person POV, she was understandable. Restless. And the book leads you to believe she's found some kind of peace.Until halfway through, when Rose's character loses all coherence. Seen through the two other POVs in the novel, she becomes one of those cliched, disaffected characters who are never satisfied with anything and are constantly leaving and hurting the people they love just because they can't help themselves. I hate these characters. They always seem shallow and self-obsessed when viewed from the outside, and that's definitely what happens here, even though (view spoiler)[the two characters who are the other POVs are her daughter and husband. This is especially maddening, because the first half of the book ends with Rose deciding she wants to keep her baby, to be a mother, and in order to do so, she marries the groundskeeper. Her motives as I read them do not track with her daughter and her husband always complaining that she ignores them or that she's apathetic. I do not understand why Patchett had her make these decisions, only to completley undercut them later in the book and basically ruin Rose's character. (hide spoiler)]
—Ashley

Yeah, so I actually didn't love this book like I was expecting to. It was kind of depressing, and there wasn't an overarching moral lesson or something that made the unhappy ending worth it. Don't get me wroing, I loved Bel Canto, and that didn't end happily either, but I actually thought this story would have been better for a different kind of ending. At least a redemption of sorts. But no luck.My biggest complaint, and this is kind of silly, but I thought the whole point with the healing springs story at the beginning was that the springs were going to heal the protagonists "broken" way of thinking. But we never came back to those springs, which was really confusing to me. Did I just miss something? That's how I felt when I finished, like I had missed something I was supposed to have caught. I'd love for anyone reading this review to clue me in.Secondly, I'm all for people acting selfishly and irrationally if they have their own reasons for it. But I never got a feeling of the protagonist's (sorry, I can't remember her name) reasons for just plain denying herself happiness. It didn't make sense and it was frustrating. If she really had a compulsion to be miserable, her thoughts on the matter should have been laid out better, rather than just watching everyone around her suffer because of her selfish and self-destructive choicesI was going to add more, but those are my major complaints. Un-happy ending, not following through with the foreshadowing, and a stupid protagonist.All that aside, I still gave it 3 stars because there are worse books out there, and it did give me something to think about.
—Danielle

I really, really enjoyed The Patron Saint of Liars. I had previously read Patchett's Bel Canto and wasn't wowed by it, particularly the ending, which I found a little forced. But The Patron Saint of Liars was great. It tells the story of Rose, a young woman who flees her young marriage, and moved to Kentucky, to a home for unwed mothers to give up the baby, and what happens to her in that place. And I just loved it - the characters seemed like real characters, their motivations understandable, and their actions real - and even better, not cliched. I kept worrying that a certain action was going to happen and was so pleased that Patchett trusted her characters (and herself) not to do the absolutely cliched thing. I was particularly impressed by the sense of place that the novel had - it was so grounded in the time period (mid-1960's), and locations (first California, then Kentucky). It just seemed absolutely real, and interesting. I don't know - it's not a book where so much happens, just a snapshot of some ordinary people's lives, but I enjoyed it so much. It is the kind of book that doesn't get the recognition of some of your big name young male writers (your Jonathan Safran Foers, say), but to me, this is a better kind of book than those flashy po-mo novels that get all the press. It actually reminded me of the Virago classics in that way - quiet books that speak truly of human experience. What I am saying is, I guess, that The Patron Saint of Liars really impressed and touched me, and now I want to read the rest of her books.
—Carrie

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