The almost melodious writing style of Ann Patchett is, of course, this book's best feature. And, as I am coming to understand is typical Patchett, the story before the story truly brought me in: a stolen Virgin Mary statue, a question of what it means to be family, rife with sibling rivalry, single parenting and trans-racial adoption. That was a story that was full of potential.

And I really liked huge chunks of Run, but most of it felt just like that -- palpable potential resting underneath: the woman who claimed to be the birth mother, and was she or was she just a groupie and the creepy, loving way she stalked her biologic sons. The saintly, dying Catholic priest uncle, and the did he or didn't he actually have the power to heal the sick. The forgotten mayor of Boston, fading into obscurity, trying to live by proxy through his sons. The prodigal son, returned home, a murderer and a thief, but possibly a modern Robin Hood, with a heart of gold and a knack for saving children. The problem is that by shifting around between all of these stories, none of them were really ever given an opportunity to come into their own.

The ending came too quickly and, as I'm also beginning to realize is typical Patchett, with a completely unnecessary time jump that left way too much unexplored. I would read the heck out of a story about an ichthyologist turned doctor turned ichthyologist (goodness knows I'm one quarter-life crisis away from writing an autobiography about the topic) and Patchett played with a lot of interesting concepts about why people go into medicine in specific, and careers as a chance of penance in general, but it A) had nothing to do with the first 300 pages and B) she didn't exactly do the topic justice in the 10 pages she had to deal with it. It added little to the book.

I'm giving Ann Patchett's fiction one more chance before I resign myself to the idea that it was truly Lucy Grealy who made Truth & Beauty come alive. ( )

I got to page 22. Nowhere near as beautifully written as Bel Canto. I understand the impulse to write something more grounded than that book, but there was something a bit anaemic and flat about the whole thing (is that a mixed metaphor?).

Here's what I wrote in 2008 about this read: "A light novel, but a good read. Family finds itself expanded by one as a result of discoveries made following a fatal car crash. As in Patchatt's other novel (Bel Canto), characters are too talented to all be believable." ( )

I agree with both the good reviews and the bad reviews for this novel. I think that is exactly what I liked about the book - I enjoyed it as fairytale, while at the same time really thought about all the issues it did not explore, or side-stepped; all the reactions and emotions that the characters weren't revealing; all the conversations that weren't had...this is life, after all: everything that we don't say to one another, that we are afraid to let outside of our thoughts, knowing we can't put them back once they are there. Whether the author intended this or not, the book made me think a lot harder about the characters than if they had behaved the way we would expect them to. ( )

This didn't go where I thought it might at the beginning. And this will contain plot spoilers. Doyle is Irish American and his wife, Bernadette, has just died when her sisters some round asking for the statue back for the family. Tradition has that it goes to the daughter most like the statue, and Doyle only has boys. Doyle refuses because his two youngest sons have it in their room, they think it is their mother. And then the story gets subverted. The boys are adopted and black. They are brothers, given up by their birth mother and taken on by Doyle and Bernadette, while he was the Mayor. The family story slowly unrolls and the family have several crises to get through. The turning point in the story comes when Doyle and the boys (now 20/21) attend a speech by Jesse Jackson. Tip determines to break away and as he tells his father, so he steps into the road and into the path of an oncoming car. He is pushed out of the way by a woman, Tennessee Moser. And we discover that she is Tip & Teddy's birth mother. Tennessee was with her daughter, Kenya, and the lives of Doyle and his sons will be intertwined with Tennessee and Kenya from here on. Told mostly over the space of a day with back story being filled in in places, this is a lovely discourse on the nature of family and what binds families together. There is clearly great love between the various men folk, be they ties of blood or not. ( )