Eight Hundred Grapes
by Laura Dave
Sight unseen—or sample unread—I knew I had to own a copy of Eight Hundred Grapes. Laura Dave takes readers to a very small town in Sonoma County called Sebastopol. Sonoma County is the second-most famous wine county in California, and the created family she writes about owns a winery. If you’ve never wine tasted in Sonoma, you’ve probably never heard of Sebastopol. Not only have I been there as a visitor in recent years, but it’s where I grew up! While other readers might think Dave made up a charming town with made-up restaurants and streets, I actually lived there! I recognized La Gare restaurant, knew Main Street by heart, and remembered—not so fondly—the very tiny neighboring town of Graton! And, low and behold, on page 85, my heart skipped a beat: “Jacob wanted to avoid downtown, so we wound up Sullivan Road into the hills—into the deep remoteness of the old apple orchards, stunning farmhouses, renovated barns.” My family lived on Sullivan Road! With two acres of apple trees!
Alright, now you know my enthusiasm for this book before I’d even read it. But, getting down to brass tacks, if this book took place somewhere else, I probably wouldn’t have liked it very much. Certain passages warmed my heart: “We reached the main strip of Graton, which wasn’t really a strip at all, just two restaurants across the street from each other.” But most of Dave’s writing style I found off-putting. She used a combination of sentence fragments to communicate her protagonist’s feelings, instead of just describing them—“Let me stop there. With what Maddie said. To Ben.”—and ridiculously trite, sarcastic “wisdoms” rattled off by every side character.
“If you’re not careful, you run out of time.”
“Be careful what you give up. . . Because, eventually, you get it back any way you can.”
In real life, no one talks that way. No one has an arsenal of one-liners read to throw at their children and siblings when they’re in the middle of a crisis, and if they did, they’d quickly get a slap in the face. No one, in the middle of a crisis, would tolerate being talked to like that.
So, since I really don’t like authors using sentence fragments in every chapter, and I don’t like sarcastic life lessons spoken at unrealistic moments, I didn’t end up liking Eight Hundred Grapes. It was darling to see my hometown and streets I remember in print, but it just wasn’t written in the style I like to read.
Alright, now you know my enthusiasm for this book before I’d even read it. But, getting down to brass tacks, if this book took place somewhere else, I probably wouldn’t have liked it very much. Certain passages warmed my heart: “We reached the main strip of Graton, which wasn’t really a strip at all, just two restaurants across the street from each other.” But most of Dave’s writing style I found off-putting. She used a combination of sentence fragments to communicate her protagonist’s feelings, instead of just describing them—“Let me stop there. With what Maddie said. To Ben.”—and ridiculously trite, sarcastic “wisdoms” rattled off by every side character.
“If you’re not careful, you run out of time.”
“Be careful what you give up. . . Because, eventually, you get it back any way you can.”
In real life, no one talks that way. No one has an arsenal of one-liners read to throw at their children and siblings when they’re in the middle of a crisis, and if they did, they’d quickly get a slap in the face. No one, in the middle of a crisis, would tolerate being talked to like that.
So, since I really don’t like authors using sentence fragments in every chapter, and I don’t like sarcastic life lessons spoken at unrealistic moments, I didn’t end up liking Eight Hundred Grapes. It was darling to see my hometown and streets I remember in print, but it just wasn’t written in the style I like to read.