Digging to America - Anne Tyler

Friday August 15th, 1997 - The night the girls arrived, two tiny Korean babies are delivered to Baltimore to two families who have not much in common.  Every year, on the anniversary of 'Arrival Day' their two extended families celebrate together, with more and more elaborately competitive parties, as tiny, delicate Susan, wholesome, stocky Jin-ho and, later, her new little sister Xiu-Mei, take roots, become American.  "Digging to America" is a novel with a deceptively small domestic canvas, and subtly large themes - it's about belonging and otherness, about insiders and outsiders, pride and prejudice, young love and unexpected old love, families and the impossibility of ever getting it right, about striving for connection and goodness against all the odds.



This novel was like nothing I expected. Before I started reading it, i thought it was about the lives of two Korean babies growing up in America, then i read the cover again and found it was about the war of acceptance between two families. None of these came across strongly in the book.  Although Tyler mentioned the two children this was very rarely and they took such a small standing in the book they were almost irrelevant. We heard more about one of the grandmas than any other character and she was my least favourite person in this story.

The whole novel was disjointed, Tyler jumped from one family member to another and seemed to go off at a limb on different story lines. SHe introduced too many characters than you could follow or be interested in. Occasionally she mentioned these yearly parties but again they were a small part of the novel.

It was such a shame she went down this route, and it made the novel very uninteresting boring and very disappointing. At some sections i would get into the book and she would change tack again and you would lose the thread. I would much rather read more about the lives of the children than the extended families and their pointless stores. A disappointing read.