Vinegar Girl: Book summary and reviews of Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

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Cloggie Downunder

Witty and funny
“She had always been such a handful – a thorny child, a sullen teenager, a failure as a college student. What was to be done with her? But now they had the answer: marry her off. They would never give her another moment’s thought”

Vinegar Girl is the twenty-first novel by American author, Anne Tyler, and is written under the Hogarth Shakespeare banner. It is billed as William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew retold. At twenty-nine, Kate Battista is in a dead-end job she doesn’t particularly like, and saddled with looking after her air-head fifteen-year-old sister and her workaholic father. Kate is no shrinking violet though: she lets them know what irritates her in no uncertain terms. Her boss suggests she practice restraint but: “The unsatisfying thing about practicing restraint was that nobody knew you were practicing it”

So when Dr Louis Battista suggests she marry Pyotr Shcherbakov, his brilliant research assistant, whose O-1 visa is about to run out, she lets her father know how she feels: “We are not in another culture, and this is not an arranged marriage. This is human trafficking….You’re sending me to live with a stranger, sleep with a stranger, just for your own personal gain”

Pyotr tries to court Kate, despite her irritability, her rudeness and her flat refusal to help. And despite the gross insult she perceives at the suggestion, his enthusiasm, his lack of guile and his straight talking begins to weaken her resolve “…they say you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” she tells him. “Yes, they would,” Pyotr said, mysteriously. “But why would you want to catch flies, hah? Answer me that, vinegar girl”

Anne Tyler’s version of this classic Shakespeare tale is an absolute delight. Her characters are ordinary people with flaws and believable quirks; their dialogue is just as ordinary and everyday; and yet, they are endearing, each in their own way. Her descriptive prose is marvellous: “an unhealthy-looking young man with patchy beige chin whiskers that reminded Kate of lichen”. And the tale is filled with humour: the reader will find themselves smiling, chuckling and (at least at the wedding ceremony) laughing out loud. Witty and funny.

Cathryn Conroy

Laugh-Out-Loud Funny!
If just the thought of reading Shakespeare is enough to make you groan, grunt or growl, this is just the book for you!

As part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project in which the Bard's plays are retold for a modern audience by some of today's best-selling authors, the incredible Anne Tyler (Confession: She is one of my favorite writers) has created a laugh-out-loud funny and very readable post-9/11 take on Shakespeare's comedy "The Taming of the Shrew." (This isn't the first such rewrite. Exhibit A: The movie "10 Things I Hate About You.")

Set in Baltimore, the book contains all the players: Kate Battista (Katherine, the shrew), Pyotr Shcherbakov (Petruchio), Bunny Battista (Bianca), Dr. Louis Battista (Minola Baptista) and Edward Mintz (Lucentio).

Anne Tyler fans, beware! This is not your typical Anne Tyler book. Remember, she was given a specific task: Rewrite "The Taming of the Shrew." That means this book (almost) has more plot points than all her other books put together! The characters are not the quirky, eccentric, bemused beings we have come to expect from her. She is following the Bard's lead on this one. But it works--and works magnificently--as long as you know what to expect.

And while you certainly don't get Shakespeare's lyrical poetry in such a rewrite, "Vinegar Girl" might just be the impetus to send some people back to the original.

Other books by Anne Tyler at BookBrowse

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