The Sylvan Lake Library Book Club Reads The Letter Opener

When we launched our Perennial site here in Canada, we did so with a splash: a contest where a book club could win books for a year. Well, the winners of that club — The Sylvan Lake Library Book Club — have read their first book. They were kind enough to send us their thoughts, and then even kinder to let us reprint them here.

“Our bookclub met in September (sorry it’s been so long before I replied, but it’s budget time and some staff have been out with flu and I’ve been a bit swamped). We quite enjoyed The Letter Opener by Kyo Maclear.

Here are some comments:

“Engaging”
“The writing really made you feel for the characters”
“Characters were intriguing and very well written”
“The writing gave great visualizations — you could easily imagine the places described”
“The characters were interesting and did interesting things. It made you want to keep reading to find out what happened to them”
“Skillful knitting together of main characters”
“Smooth bridging of diverse stories”
This story was like her “second coming of age”

All really enjoyed the “P.S.” section at the back and found it very interesting and informative. Many were inspired to seek more information and during our book club meeting many of us recalled stories of items lost in the mail, or miraculously turning up… This book enabled us to have some really great discussions!

The one criticism we all had with the book was that the cover was not very alluring. All of us were surprised by how much we’d enjoyed the book because none of us were very excited by the cover. I know this is a small thing, and different editions have different covers, but I thought I’d give you the whole tale. None of us thought we would have picked this title based on seeing this cover. We’re glad we did read it for book club, but it likely would have been missed if we’d seen this on the shelf.

Thank you again for the copies of the book[s] — we really did enjoy the story”.

And our thanks go out to Shannan and the Sylvan Lake Book Club for their honest, interesting and engaging response to Kyo Maclear’s novel.