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Thanks for the explanation, AnotherCat. I started to read The Luminaries because it has all the features of a book that sounds interesting to me. I put it aside after about 10% and have not returned to it.
I finished Owls Do Cry last week. The structure was unique from any book that I can recall. The chapters start out with the family view, then goes into each of the siblings and the Epilogue from the Woolen Mill Manager was unexpected. There was the structure of the writing such as the stream of consciousness representative of Daphne's mental illness. Also italics was used for Daphne's view points throughout the chapters until the epilogue.
Identity was a big theme in the book. There was how the characters viewed themselves versus how the world saw them and their struggle to reconcile both. It seemed they tried to escape from how others saw them but weren't successful at it. Chicks could assume a fancy society name (Teresa) and buy materialistic home gadgets but that didn't make her happy. Toby went from people treating him like trash because of his physical illness to dealing in trash. There were also many references to destruction through the novel (burning, fires, letters torn up, death, murders). The epilogue did not have a happy ending on how these characters lives could have turned out!
I'm still thinking about how to interpret the epilogue and the rest of the novel. I'm very interested to hear everyone else's thoughts.
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