Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I wanted to love this book (I've lived in Boston, am of Irish Catholic descent, and even have a friend from Gate of Heaven parish and school), but found it over-written, under-plotted, and in search of its own identity (memoir or novel?). Carson spends long paragraphs describing an endless number of physical details (clothing, furnishings, table-settings, wall-paper, hairstyles, recipes), and often in cloyingly sweet and trite terms. ("cute as ever" "dewy, fair-skinned beauty," "she had the look of a fairy-tale maiden.") Moreover, the author is not averse to the 100-plus word sentence ( p. 340). Ms. Carson favors length and is addicted to commas, semi-colons, and run-on descriptions. I kept looking for the periods. But what's really missing here is some great unifying tension to sustain the book: there is no central conflict which does just that. This is a meandering generational narrative that hops social classes, and provides character sketches, but does not cohere in any meaningful way. A red coat does not a conflict make. Finally, though it is a work of fiction, the novel includes photos of the buildings or shops described and even photos of some of the supposedly fictional people. This sort of genre-hopping (memoir or fiction?) is disorienting. I got to page 347 and gave up. I rated this book two stars instead of one because a dedicated writer put a lot of love and research into this book and some of her passion for her subject will infect the reader too (as the many positive reviews show). But it is not a compelling novel. Where were the editors?