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If I Told You Once
Customer Reviews
Rating:  - Oh so Super Great!
I am an avid reader, especially for a 14 year old girl. I rarely truly enjoy a book but i thought this story was woderful! ofcourse there are a few things bad with it,it has a tendancy to ramble and sometimes the words form no true emotons while your reading but it was a really great plot and it was oh so very touching! It's a story about Ilana, a girl from from Russia that falls madly in love with a man named sHmuel. They move to america and there they create a family. They have a daugher named Sashie and then the story switches into her point of view. Then Sashie in turn has a daughter of her own which then also gets to take over the story telling. In the end the three women take in a baby girl their great-grandaughter, grand-daughter, and neice. They call the girl Nomie, her name is Niaomi. She actually begins to love Ilana when the others resented and feared her. The book is long but still very much worth it!
Rating: - If I Told You Once is a Mother Goose tale turned inside out!
Ilana yearns to leave the poverty of her Eastern Europeanvillage, to embark on a voyage to the New World...
This is not agentle story of a girl's wandering in the wilderness & hereventual escape, yet there is an innocence, a wonder & aremarkable change in perspective.
A profound transformational workof values, honor, madness & reality. Destined to become a classicin women's literature...
Rating: - best I've read in years
Judy Budnitz is the first writer I've read in years who works more with the raw material her imagination than from pieces of her own life...she doesn't seem like a member of any scene or school of thought and for that I think "If I Told You Once," as well as her collection of stories "Flying Leap," will stand the test of time while the more fashionable fame-drunk young-lit types will fall and burn out by the wayside.
Rating: - Poignant commentary on womanhood
Judy Budnitz's imagination is wild enough to be exciting but restrained enough to stay focused on the matter at hand. In _If I Told You Once_, she tackles womanhood, adeptly and with amazing insight. Though the characters are harsh and conflicted, both internally and in relationship, their voices are crisp and honest and unapologetically eccentric.
I look forward to Ms. Budnitz's long and fruitful literary career. It's going to be a good one.
Rating:  - Dull and depressing
The first few chapters of this book were encouraging, but somewhere in the middle the story just fell apart. I was expecting Ilana's life to unfold into a tale of adventure consistent with her youthful ambition, but as soon as she moves to the city, she loses all her spark and likeability and becomes a closed-minded old hag.
Her daughters and their daughters are not much better. Their characters are boring, one-dimensional, and unlikeable. There is nothing interesting about their life stories or the depressing tenement in which they live.
I forced myself to finish the book, hoping that one or more of them would get a life sooner or later and the energy of the earlier chapters would reappear. It never did.
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