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    The O'Briens
    The O'Briens
    The O'Briens
    Audiobook13 hours

    The O'Briens

    Written by Peter Behrens

    Narrated by Paul Hecht

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The O' Briens is an unforgettable saga of love, loss, and change spanning half a century in the lives of a restless patriarch and his splendid, tragic, ambitious clan. In Joe O' Brien-- backwoods boy, railroad magnate, brooding soul-- Peter Behrens gives us a fiercely compelling man who exchanges isolation and poverty in the Canadian wilds for a share in the dazzling possibilities and consuming sorrows of the twentieth century. When Joe meets Iseult Wilkins in Venice-by-the-Sea, California, their courtship becomes the first movement in a symphony of the generations. The O' Briens is the story of a marriage and a family moving through the turbulence of history, told with epic precision and wondrous imagination.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMar 6, 2012
    ISBN9781464038280
    The O'Briens

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    Reviews for The O'Briens

    3.5/5

    29 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Skillfully crafted with well-drawn characters and evocative settings, this is escapist fiction that feels more literary. It does seem half-baked at times, as Behrens creates too many inconclusive narrative threads, but I appreciate how immersive his storytelling is. Behrens exemplifies one approach to writing fiction as a sort of wish-fulfillment, creating an alternate life where things are better, the people are more beautiful and more interesting, with just enough drama to justify a plot.
    • 4/5
      This is a story about two generations in a family. The O'Brien brothers and sisters grew up in the Pontiac region of Quebec from the turn of the 20th century to the early 60s. This is apparently a sequel to an earlier book where the first O'Briens arrived in Canada but it isn't reliant on that so much that you couldn't pick this up and enjoy it. The main character is Joe O'Brien, the oldest brother. The children lose their mother to illness and have to deal with a stepfather who is an alcoholic. Two of the brothers, Joe and Grattan are the characters that continue through the story. The sisters are sent off to a convent and a third brother is sent to be a priest and we really don't see much of them again. Joe starts a business on the family property when he's only a teenager and builds up his businesses over the decades into a huge construction and engineering company. He meets Iseault in Venice, California. They marry and move to northern BC where Joe has a contract to build part of the Canadian Railway through the Rockies. This is the story of their life and family, their marraige which breaks down into bits several times. This is the story of their children's lives as well, and Grattan and his wife and daughter, through WWI, the depression and into WWII and beyond. The book is really well written and the characters of Joe and Iseault are very well developed, more so than the others because the book is from their points of view. It was easy to follow the various characters in both generations, something that's not always easy to do depending on the complexity of the writing but this author is very smooth with that. You really get a good sense of what life was like in Canada both in the remote rural areas of the mountains and in Montreal during the first half of the 20th century. Good characters, good dialogue. A good read.