Vinegar Girl

Hogarth Press

Vinegar Girl
Anne Tyler
2016

The Summary
"Kate Battista feels stuck.  How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and uppity, pretty younger sister, Bunny?  Plus, she's always in trouble at work--her preschool charges adore her, but their parents don't always appreciate her unusual opinions and forthright manner.

"Dr. Battista has his own problems.  After years in the academic wilderness, he is on the verge of a breakthrough.  His research could help millions.  There's only one problem:  his brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported.  And without Pyotr, all would be lost.

"When Dr. Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he's relying--as usual--on Kate to help him.  Kate is furious:  this time he's really asking too much.  But will she be able to resist the two men's touchingly ludicrous campaign to bring her around?"

The Good
Vinegar Girl was interesting, to say the least.  A little odd, yes, but it was strangely compelling.  I couldn't help getting wound up in Kate Battista's life, couldn't help wondering what would happen as she struggled to deal with her wild child sister and tried to corral her father's mismanagement and fend off Pyotr's obvious affection.  I was somehow hooked by her story, and I found I couldn't put it down.

I've never read anything by Anne Tyler and, oddly enough, I've never read (but I have seen) The Taming of the Shrew.  Despite my lack of exposure to writer and inspiration, I thoroughly enjoyed Vinegar Girl.  First off, I should state that Tyler is a wonderful writer.  There's something about the story that drew me, a cadence to the narration that made the story appealing on a visceral level for me, and a way the characters were made that kept me coming back for more.

And she's descriptive!

I hate when authors don't set the stage, when they don't offer descriptions of the characters or give weak descriptions about the scene.  Tyler, luckily, does a wonderful job of bringing life to her characters, showing off the little details that make them unique and intriguing, and unfolding an entire world on the pages.  She helps me sink into the story, helps me feel like I'm really there with Kate as she weeds her garden or as she walks the next few blocks to her father's lab because he forgot his lunch (again) or fights with Bunny over the boy she wasn't supposed to bring into the house.

Plus, I found Kate to be singularly enjoyable.  She's headstrong, she's fiery, she's brutally honest and blunt even when speaking to children, and she's incredibly intelligent.  Tyler crafts a compelling and sympathetic character in Kate, creating a complex female character who is pulled in many different directions by her loyalty to her family, her interest in her own career, and her dreams for herself.

And, as an aside, I want to note that I actually appreciated Pyotr's accent.  I mean, after reading What's a Ghoul to Do?, which also features a character with a heavy accent, I realized Anne Tyler does a fantastic job of conveying accents, of individual speech patterns.  Like Dr. Sable in Victoria Laurie's first Ghost Hunter novel, Pyotr does not have a complete grasp of English.

However, unlike Laurie, Tyler manages to make her character's struggle with his second language seem natural, rather than forced.  He trips up on the rules and language quirks that even native speakers may struggle to grasp and he may have difficulty with verbs, articles, and the like, but his lingual missteps seem more like natural mistakes than forced attempts to make him seem cute or bumbling.

The Bad
No complaints, really.  I mean, some part of me did wish for more for Kate, did wish she wasn't so constricted and confined by her family--but isn't that often the way with family and love and marriage?  Sometimes the burdens fall in different patterns, meaning responsibilities (and thus challenges) do not always fall evenly.

But, I suppose, if she's happy with how things turned out, how can I complain?

The Ugly
Family dynamics can get messy.

Let's just leave it at that, okay?