M Train by Patti Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I loved Just Kids beyond measure. If there was a word stronger than love, I would use it to describe my feelings for the that book, so my expectations for M Train may have been a tad unrealistic.
Written in a far more “stream of consciousness” style, M Train didn’t pull me into the story–an era, a lifestyle, a heartbeat, the way Just Kids did so poignantly.
M Train takes a lot of thought and brain power to read, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I didn’t feel that compulsion I had with Just Kids to keep hungrily turning the pages. Smith’s choice of words is again, and as always, remarkably strung together to incite an emotion, or help the reader visit a place with which they are unfamiliar.
M Train is worth the read – Smith’s style is unique, and in the case of M Train it’s like looking at a complicated painting. It takes a bit of time to deconstruct the work and really think about it in order to interpret a meaning. It’s pretty cool that we can draw our own conclusions about meaning from a work like M Train v Just Kids, which tells us a story in a more traditional (but gorgeous) way.
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