On Beauty, Zadie Smith

What a perfectly delicious book! Scrumptious down to the last word. This is a story about two families with professors as their heads of household living in Boston in a college centered middle class community. The Kippses and Belseys are long time rivals due to their divergent views on Rembrant's work. But that really is just background static. The book is mostly about the dynamics of the Belsey family and how they interact with one another and with the Kippses. I love this book because the characters are so vivid and there were at least five times that I said out loud, "yes this is the feeling- exactly". She just has a knack about explaining what you feel though she wrote about something so completely different. What I really liked was that the characters were likeable and their lives though dreary at times still had that realistic under current of having highs and lows much like any other regular family. Some stories like this take themselves too seriously and you finish wanting to weep for days, their stories haunting you to peices. But this isn't like that. It deals with harsh issues but in a manner that you read, absorb, but move on from still loving most of them anyways. It's a great book. I recommend it.