I'll Take You There
A Novel
-
-
3.8 • 80 Ratings
-
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
“Wally Lamb’s affection for these characters is so palpable, his intentions so palpably good, that it’s hard not to be touched by this sweet-natured novel.”—Washington Post
In this radiant homage to the resiliency, strength, and power of women, Wally Lamb—author of numerous New York Times bestselling novels including She’s Come Undone, I Know This Much is True, and We Are Water—weaves an evocative, deeply affecting tapestry of one Baby Boomer's life and the trio of unforgettable women who have changed it.
I’ll Take You There centers on Felix, a film scholar who runs a Monday night movie club in what was once a vaudeville theater. One evening, while setting up a film in the projectionist booth, he’s confronted by the ghost of Lois Weber, a trailblazing motion picture director from Hollywood’s silent film era. Lois invites Felix to revisit—and in some cases relive—scenes from his past as they are projected onto the cinema’s big screen.
In these magical movies, the medium of film becomes the lens for Felix to reflect on the women who profoundly impacted his life. There’s his daughter Aliza, a Gen Y writer for New York Magazine who is trying to align her postmodern feminist beliefs with her lofty career ambitions; his sister, Frances, with whom he once shared a complicated bond of kindness and cruelty; and Verna, a fiery would-be contender for the 1951 Miss Rheingold competition, a beauty contest sponsored by a Brooklyn-based beer manufacturer that became a marketing phenomenon for two decades. At first unnerved by these ethereal apparitions, Felix comes to look forward to his encounters with Lois, who is later joined by the spirits of other celluloid muses.
Against the backdrop of a kaleidoscopic convergence of politics and pop culture, family secrets, and Hollywood iconography, Felix gains an enlightened understanding of the pressures and trials of the women closest to him, and of the feminine ideals and feminist realities that all women, of every era, must face.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A middle-aged scholar of Hollywood’s Golden Age encounters ghosts at the beautifully restored movie house in his Connecticut hometown. The premise of Wally Lamb’s sixth novel is light and jaunty, a welcome escape from real life. As Felix Funicello gets more and more involved with his phantom visitors, he learns to more fully appreciate the advances that American women have made and the obstacles still confounding the likes of his hard-working ex-wife and ambitious daughter. I’ll Take You There is in no way deep, but it’s a big-hearted novel that’s breezy fun.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Not long after film scholar Felix Funicello turns 60, a very strange thing starts happening. At the empty theater in New York City where he normally shows classic movies to his film group, two ghosts show up instead, with reels of their own. The "movies" they show Felix are of his own childhood, which he not only watches but also literally reenters, experiencing a kind of dual awareness of the present and his memories of the past, primarily the fights between his two older sisters. The ghosts in charge are women who were silent film era heroines, including Lois Weber, an actress and eventual powerhouse director. While it's clear that Lamb (We Are Water) intended this framework as a kind of celebration or heralding of unsung women, the setup feels not like illuminating magical realism but simply like far too much of a stretch. When he's not hanging out with ghosts, Felix is the encouraging father of Aliza, his adult daughter trying to make a name for herself as a journalist in present-day New York City. With both humans and the supernatural, Felix's relationships feel forced, awkward, and unlikely, in no small part because of his trite, preachy wisdom: "Bad things can happen to good people. Bad people do sometimes thrive and get away with terrible transgressions." However, nearly 200 pages in, Felix watches the "movie" of the story of his sister Frances, who was adopted in the early 1950s, a few years before Felix was born. Frances's birth mother, Verna, was 17 years old and married to a man in the Merchant Marines who was oversees when she became pregnant by Felix's uncle. After giving birth to Frances, alone and prematurely in a hotel bathroom, she died. Verna's story makes up the bitter, believable, and well-told last third of the book, raising the question why Lamb didn't chuck the ghost and movie shtick, along with Felix's corny narration, to simply write about three generations of the Funicello family.
Customer Reviews
A great listen..lol
This was my first experience reading a metabook and in reading anything written by Wally Lamb...and the metabook totally changed the experience for me. The character's had a voice that helped to connect to their personality and picture what they would look like. I thoroughly enjoyed the metabook experience. As for the story....At first I wasn't sure where it was headed as Felix (young and old) told his story and the characters told their own....but I was intrigued by the lives of the Funicello Family and his relationship with his siblings....and family secrets. The plot came with a twist at the perfect time and there was so much detail that I felt like I could picture everything in my head. This book talks to a lot of topics, family, culture, religion, feminism....during a time when people were still fighting for their rights! He told the story from a very different time and didn't miss a beat on how times have changed and evolved! I have not read his other books so can't compare it but I really enjoyed it!!
I'll Take You There
First, I love Wally Lamb's books so I hate to write this but I was so disappointed in this one. I actually had to make myself read it which would be unthinkable with his others which I wrestled to put down. The dialogue was often trite, the characters stereotyped and I am getting a little bored with the Rheingold Girls. It seems he did a tremendous amount of research for The Hour I First Believed and needed to get more mileage out of it. Also beating to death some of the political agendas got tiresome. I love his plot lines with intricate interweaving and surprise connections but did not find it with this book. Looking foreword to something more intriguing with the next one I read. Maybe you just cannot please everybody all the time but this book was not my cup of tea.
Disjointed
Good concept, poorly executed. Too much detail where there shouldn't be, and not enough where there needs to be.