The Easter Parade
by Richard Yates
Isn’t it an incredible and beautiful talent to capture the essence of the opposite gender in a novel? While I’ve read some very good attempts, I haven’t read any women authors who have captured the male perspective as well as Richard Yates captured the female perspective in The Easter Parade. This is an incredibly difficult book to get through, and while I probably wouldn’t want to read it again, I do feel it was worth it. Yates’s talent is fantastic.
With a riveting start, two sisters’ lives are destroyed by their parents’ divorce. Even from childhood, each girl is given unique and realistic differences, yet binding ties that show they were brought up in the same household. As the girls become women and their lives diverge further, readers can get further and further depressed. I’m not exactly sure what the point of this novel was, besides the fact that no one makes it through with a happy life. Normally, I don’t really like chronicles of depression with no proactive attempts to change—a preference of mine only recently pointed out by a dear friend—and The Easter Parade isn’t very proactive. It’s a large slice of tragic lives. If you like books like that, you’ll probably love this one. If you don’t, you’ll probably appreciate the writing then find yourself in dire need of a Hallmark movie marathon.
With a riveting start, two sisters’ lives are destroyed by their parents’ divorce. Even from childhood, each girl is given unique and realistic differences, yet binding ties that show they were brought up in the same household. As the girls become women and their lives diverge further, readers can get further and further depressed. I’m not exactly sure what the point of this novel was, besides the fact that no one makes it through with a happy life. Normally, I don’t really like chronicles of depression with no proactive attempts to change—a preference of mine only recently pointed out by a dear friend—and The Easter Parade isn’t very proactive. It’s a large slice of tragic lives. If you like books like that, you’ll probably love this one. If you don’t, you’ll probably appreciate the writing then find yourself in dire need of a Hallmark movie marathon.