Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtry

No Series
DRAMA

rating

An Oscar-winning story of a memorable mother and her fiesty daughter who find the courage and humor to live through life's hazards and to love each other as never before. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove created two characters who won the hearts of readers and moviegoers everywhere--Aurora Greenway and her daughter Emma.





 

“It was inconsiderate, she thought, how blandly people mentioned the future in the sick rooms. Phrases like next summer were always popping out; people made such assumptions about their own continuity.”

Terms of Endearment is a movie I grew up on and adored. I admit that even though I know every bit of dialogue by now that comes up during the sad scenes, I still sob like a baby during a couple of emotionally crushing scenes.

Terms of Endearment the novel earned my biggest disappointed rating of 2017. Being a big fan of the movie, I was hopeful – and stack on how much I loved reading Lonesome Dove by the author that I had strong belief in his writing ability. What should have been a winning formula instead turned into a story-line that was flat and misdirected with generic and dull characters.

The movie added a lot of plot characteristics that made it work - such as the astronaut next door, Aurora finding love she was afraid to find, the fears of commitment, more on the side of the daughter Emma and her life. In the book most of the first 3/4 is part of a long date where Aurora is going back and forth with annoying two men in her life. It's irritating. The distant style writing with dry scenes and the a woman who it was hard to like didn’t help.

Rosie the maid and her strange husband background take a lot of the book up later too, which I ended up having to skim through. Finally Emma's point of view comes in at the very end but its short lived and doesn't earn more stars. Emma as an actual character was much flatter and not nearly as intriguing since the author wants to focus mainly on Aurora and Rosie.

The mother-daughter bond just doesn’t come across as that convincing, and even the ending isn’t that sad in comparison to how it could have been if the story carried more realistic emotion. There wasn’t enough emotion written into Aurora to make me care as much.

Not a pleasant read or even that sad since the ending is almost an abbreviated afterthought. I don’t read – or watch – simple for sad endings, but the journey was dull as well thanks to almost meaningless aims of Aurora and Rosie and lack of emotion and bonding.




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