Stones from Ibarra - Harriet Doerr

Last night our book club met to discuss "Stones from Ibarra" then the one hour drive home took over two as we had to drive through a winter wonderland of blowing snow. There were a couple of times that the semi trucks seemed to be barreling straight at us on 61 and I had to close my eyes as we were forced way over to the edge of the road. It was kinda scary. By midnight I was home and anxious to jump in to my new book "Loving Frank" which has grabbed me from the first page with the Goethe quote - "One Lives but onces in the world".

But, back to "Stones from Ibarra". It is a first novel for a 73 year old woman who also graduated from college at about the same age. It's a bit autobiographical as she lived in Mexico and her husband died from a blood disease, similar to Richard, the husband in the book. Her writing is beautiful and descriptive, but the book was a little disjointed as it's a series of short stories that the author attemps to weave together. It did win a national book award and Harriet Doerr (author) does manage to give a very charming picture of life in a poor Mexican village. One thing I really liked about the book was she never gives a 'moral of the story' as she describes certain behaviors and things that happen. She just leaves them laying there for you to decipher. I asked the married women at the book club what they thought of the two main characters as 'husband and wife' because some of their behaviour seemed peculiar to me. For instance, the main character Sara is always making up things or using her imagination to round out a story which is annoying to her husband. Since they were living in a small village without electricity - hence, no tv, radio - I saw it as entertaining storytelling. You never really know, but some of the married women thought it was because the husband wanted her to be grounded in reality and face that he was going to die. There was nothing concrete about the ending, no wrapping up of loose ends and no bookclub discussion questions in the back of the book so it honestly made for a really great discussion with our group.