Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: "I changed. I noticed it then."Comment: To say that I enjoyed The Woman Who Walked into Doors would not be the right description. The book is a rather harrowing depiction of a woman in the grip of spousal abuse and alcoholism. A woman who tries, in a now familiar story, to reconcile the idea of a man who loves her with a man who beats her.
Customer Rating: Summary: Sad story, lovely main characterComment: I would recommend this book to a friend. It is not a happy story, but the main character is immensely likable, and her story is interesting and worth reading. I liked Paula Spencer. She's funny, insightful, vulnerable and charming. She is also flawed, which makes her seem very real to me. It was hard to read this book though, because the shadow of her tragedy creeps across every page. Doyle waits until the final chapters to tell us, though, about Paula's battering at the hands of a man she loves, her "shattered" husband, Charlo. The title tells us what we do and do not want to know, so I think it's fine that Doyle waits until the end to reveal it all.
Customer Rating: Summary: The woman who walked into doorsComment: I read that Roddy Doyle was J K Rowling's favorite author. His fiction was too real and depressing. Plus it was hard to follow as he jumped from the past to present day often.Customer Rating: Summary: AmbivelentComment: I think my main problem with this book was the language. I found all the cursing distracting, and made the flow of the book choppy. I gave it three stars because if you take all the cursing out of the book, it was quite good.
Customer Rating: Summary: "He gave me a choice--right or left. I chose left, and he broke the little finger on my left hand."Comment: Written in 1996, this "prequel" to 2007's Paula Spencer, tells of Paula's life from her teen years to her passionate relationship with Charlo Spencer. Part of a family of robbers, Charlo is an exciting man who makes her feel alive and gives her a sense of selfhood. Booker Prize-winner Doyle crafts a dramatic first-person narrative told by Paula, who leaves her rigid home and unsympathetic father to marry Charlo, a man her father disapproves of. Their passionate relationship and remarkable sense of communication vanish when Paula becomes pregnant with the first of their four children. Gradually, Paula finds solace in alcohol, as Charlo becomes an absentee husband and father and eventually a philandering wife-abuser.
