Margarettown by Gabrielle Zevin

This book was an interesting crossroad between Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac and Elsewhere, but in a good way. I still preferred Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, but I think that is mostly because this book was just a bit too full of gritty reality to suite my taste.

Margarettown is a deeply psychological that borders on magical realism and explores the mind of a woman as seen by the man who loved her as told to the daughter he is leaving behind. A little complex, no? The book is supposedly written for the daughter of the narrator, as the narrator is dying of cancer. The narrator makes several references to the woman's anatomy such as her pubic hair which puzzled me since it was written by the father for the daughter once she is old enough, though at the time of the account being written the girl is only nine.

Once I got used the the strange way the plot twisted, and the reality of the story turned, I found it to be very interesting. There are several places in the book where the importance of perspective is stressed, that life can be seen from a great many directions. A lot of the themes explored here are echoed in her young adult book Elsewhere, which is completely fantasy, and somehow made less sense to me.

This book basically represents the fact that truth is not always what you believe it to be, and that reality hinges on perspective. We see the main character slip up into several people: May as a child, Meg as a teen, Greta as a young adult, Maggie as young woman, Marge as a woman past her prime, and finally old Margaret. I think that it is true that a woman is many people in her life, though Margaret is established as particularly complex character, and the narrator no entirely trustworthy.

If you want to read this book, you must accept that it will not entirely make sense, that the truth will only be eluded to, and that you are left to a large part to draw your own conclusions. I enjoyed this abstract voyage into a relationship, as this is a subject on which Zevin is particularly eloquent. I enjoyed this book well enough, and was sympathetic to the openly flawed characters. This book is not at the top of my favorite books, but it was thoughtful read and I am not sorry I read it.