Kate Armstrong

GREAT ESCAPES transports readers around the globe to over 70 travel destinations and then offers up 'Essential Experiences' lists of things to do once you arrive. Would-be travelers are treated to exotic sites in Spain, Africa, China, Bhutan, the U.K., Canada, Colombia and other locales. Each destination is highlighted in a three-four page essay featuring lots of gorgeous, full-color photographs along with maps, further readings and so on. Armchair travelers will be delighted and intrigued by Luke Waterson's wondrous travel guide.

Mike O. / Marathon County Public Library
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Kate Armstrong's debut novel The Storyteller is a beautifully written work that, I think, can be understood in several ways, or at least from several perspectives. I was unsure initially what I was reading yet even with that shadow of uncertainty I was drawn in.

On one level this is a young woman's story told back to her through the voice and perspective of an older woman. The fact they meet in a mental ward opens the novel to various readings. Is the story being told by the older woman true? Okay, what is true anyway, maybe better: is the story being told factual? Hmmm, okay, factual as verifiable by an outside observer since we all have perceptions and those perceptions are facts. not necessarily the content of the perceptions but the existence of the perceptions. Honest, the book is not nearly as pretzel-like as what I just wrote. The beauty is that it allows a reader to begin asking questions about the story that carry over into questions about life as a whole.

I like to think of the story as being skeletally fairly "factual" but many of the details to be a synthesis of what the older woman learned about what happened and her own experiences coping with similar situations and feelings. What is easy to overlook until you stop and reflect is that we are also getting a version of the older woman's life as well.

What are our lives other than stories? Stories we tell, stories others tell and the stories we co-write with almost everyone else in our lives. This book looks at life stories and in some ways questions just who gets to tell a person's story. We are often unreliable narrators of our own lives but others do not have access to all of the details, so who tells it and in what setting?

I would highly recommend this to readers of literary fiction as well as those interested in psychological studies of characters. We all have far more in common with these two woman than we likely realize and empathetically understanding them will help us better understand ourselves.

Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads' First Reads.… (meer)