Book Review: The English American

I picked The English American because the author will be at the book festival I've been thinking about going to this weekend. It sounded like it could be interesting - a story about an English girl who was adopted from America.

So what do I think? This book is interesting to me - part of it made me want to keep reading and I devoured the first half quite quickly. The second half of the book dragged. I found myself wanting to shake Pippa. She seemed to naively bounce along and do exactly what everyone else wanted her to do just because she was English and apparently English people don't stand up for themselves and hide their emotions.

I think this book tried to be too many things:
- A take on the cultural differences between Americans and British people. The British according to Larkin are reserved, quite, don't share their feelings, etc. Americans by contrast are loud (most in the book are downright obnoxious), pushy, and overly emotional.
- A slight political rant on whether or not England and the US should be in the Iraq war.
- The feelings an adopted person goes through growing up and deciding to search for their birth parents.
- A romance.

There are probably more subplots but that's all I can think of at the moment. I think the book would have served a much better purpose to pick one or two things and go with that. The part about Pippa being liberal and against Bush and the war really served no purpose in the book other than to have a few spats with friends and her birth-father.

The romance in the book feels contrived and the "surprise" ending wasn't much of a surprise. It was pretty much romance book writing 101 - does she fall for the jerky guy she's been lusting after or the friend who is always there for her. I won't tell you who but I'm sure anyone who has read much Chick Lit can figured it out.

I felt like the ending in general was a major let down - it was this big build up to will Pippa finally wake up and realize who she is and fall in love, etc. and the book quickly wraps everything up in about twenty pages.

The cultural differences were interesting but very stereotypical. I just don't think every English person is reserved and quiet and all Americans are brash, arrogant over-sharers. As an American, I felt like we were painted in a very bad light. Larkin has apparently spent time in the US but was raised elsewhere. I would hope her experience with Americans has not been so crazy. It would be as if I wrote a book about typical stereotypes of English people or Canadians, or French people... it was a lot like a horoscope to me - all Americans are this and all British are this. I've read other books by British authors and never came away with quite the same take on the British (who in this book I felt came off in a bad light as well - as a bunch of push-overs who quietly go along accepting their lot in life). I liked the language differences a lot - the difference between a pocketbook and a wallet for example - and the fact that apparently Fig Newtons don't exist in England.

Although it says in the back of the book that the author Alison Larkin was adopted as well and shares a similar story to Pippa - I felt like Larkin had read a book on how adoptees feel and tossed every stereotype imaginable into the work. Pippa loves but feels unconnected to her family (the ones that adopted her), she has issues with abandonment, she doesn't let people close to her, her (adopted) family doesn't understand her, she feels guilty for talking to her birth family, her birth family when she meets them suddenly get her and love her instantly... It felt contrived.

Let's talk about Pippa's birth parents for a second. Pippa finds them and meets them - Billie and Walt. Walt is a self-centered politician (they never really say what he does but he works in DC in the government so lets just say politician). He's cheated on his wife with Billie, who ended up getting pregnant and they gave the baby up to not hurt his career. He claims to have loved Billie but later you learn that he had a son with his wife the same year Billie had Pippa. Pippa is immediately infatuated by him despite the fact that he seems stand-offish and is obviously a people user. Billie on the other hand, works with art somehow - her job seems very fluid. Pippa is also drawn to her. She moves in with her shortly after meeting her - which just seems weird. Billie is from Georgia and from the very beginning seems like she has some sort of mental disorder. She's spacey, she over-shares, she's downright trashy. If I was Pippa I would have been on the next plane back to England. But instead she tries again and again to make it work with them and suffers through both of their antics far too long.

I would say the book is 2 out of 5 stars. For me it would have faired much better as young adult literature or if Larkin could have tightened up the story a bit. The book starts strong but flounders miserably halfway through. I only finished it to see exactly what happened to Pippa and I won't say I wasn't tempted to just skip to the end.