~book~ Hemingway's Girl

Hemingway's Girl by Erika Robuck
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I feel like I should start by saying that I am not a huge fan of Hemingway. It's really as simple as I don't completely dig his writing style and that little fact that I'm a woman. I am also impossibly drawn to reading about great authors that I don't love in historical fiction. I'm not really sure why that is, but I always have been.

This book is set from the late winter to summer of 1935 in Key West. Told from the perspective of Mariella, a struggling young girl supporting her grieving mother and two young sisters. They're father has recently passed away and it's left to Mariella to keep a roof over their head and money for a doctor for the youngest girl. She meets Hemingway and a veteran around the same time and much of story revolves around her conflicting attraction and feelings for the two men.

The crux of a book like this is the relationships and character. Without a grasp of these two things, the story will just fall apart as another romantic piece of trite bs. Robuck has an amazing grasp of the both. Mariella is that "strong woman" in historical fiction that generally makes me want to throw things at the wall, but in this case she is realistically strong. She's not just strong and highly moral in an immoral world. She is strongly attracted to a married man. She sneaks around with a vet behind her mother's back. She is raw and real and struggles with her faith.

Hemingway is really a supporting character here used to highlight the balance of physical attraction and morality. The battle of what one should want and what one does want. If it feels obvious how things are going, it frequently doesn't go that way. The best relationship in this novel is not between Mariella and any man, but between her mother and her. It's a difficult relationship that perfectly sums up the mother/teenage daughter dynamic.

Simply put, this book is well worth a read.

View all my reviews