Rating: 
Summary: just a note
Review: I just finished reading this and was in the process of buying it for a friend when i happened to notice the reviews here - especially how many of them were so disturbed at the very idea of a dying woman remembering her "one night stand" with a "cad", and referring to the characters as shallow, etc. Now, admittedly we are not talking about shakespeare here, but it is a good book. And I am afraid I completely believe that a woman's mind would linger on the earth-shattering, teeth-chattering, existential sexual experience she had at 25 as she lay dying. Of course she did. This was the experience that all later experiences echoed. It doesnt matter that she had husbands later, or children. (Her marriages sounded dreadful.) This experience was an awaking, and she felt opened and alive in it the way one can at 25. Her father was an alcoholic, none of the men she pined for were really worthy in the end, all of them were a disappointment. Arden, at least, was simply unfulfilled promise, and he never disappointed her, he just left.
Rating: 
Summary: Difficult to Digest
Review: I really wanted to like this book, but I was hindered by the author's writing style. Without any warning, I would have read a page before I realized I had stumbled upon one of Ann Grant's memories from the past. Even though Ann suffered from a terrible illness, I had no compassion for this character or her life. My mind wandered a lot while trying to read this book. The book was not interesting to me at all.
Rating: 
Summary: A major undertaking which doesn't work.
Review: I agree with many of the readers who enjoyed the style and agree that it accurtely portrays the way some one dying nd heavily medicated might drift in and out and confuse events and people. However, the emphasis on what was essentially a two night stand as the highpoint of her life doesn't ring true. It might have worked if she had never met another man she cared for or if she had seen him again but the vivid and detailed memory she had of the weekend with him didn't work for me except as an example of what might have been--and her life was too full of other sexual experiences to make me believe that this one experience would have been so meaningful to her.I also found the protrayal of her children too vague--who are they and what do they really feel about her and one another. So much time is spend on The Weekend that the other characters are lost. A noble effort but flawed by the choice of centerpiece for the story.
Rating:
Summary: Air Poetry
Review: Susan Minot has a fine command of the English language, but she wastes it on this story. Her prose has been compared to poetry; in the absence of a compelling story and sympathetic characters, her writing is precious and pretentious. I had difficulty developing a feeling for the main character, Ann, with whose impending death we are expected to sympathize. The unraveling of her tale, centering on a weekend love affair many years before, is a protracted tease that ultimately amounts to little more than air.
Rating:
Summary: Sensitive presentation of difficult subject
Review: Death is a difficult concept for any of us to consider and Susan Minot has been able to show the reader how death comes. Cancer is presented sensitively with a vividness that is real. Ann Lord is a protrayed as a complex and the reader is made to care about her from the first chapter.
Rating: 
Summary: A Stunning Book
Review: Please don't be put of by some of the negative reviews that appear here. This is the most beautiful, engaging book I have picked up in ages. The style is exquisite, lyrical. I found parts of this book so true and close to me that it almost hurt to read it. Anyone can find a piece of themselves here as a dying woman remembers the love of her life and what he represented. Please give this book a chance!
Rating:
Summary: hypnotic ....
Review: Susan Minot is one of the most gifted writers. I must read it again! Minot's senses are keen. She gives us back what we may have forgotten! This book will remain on my shelf for many years to come.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing story despite engaging dying state
Review: One questions the depth of Ann's sentiments knowing her age and her rather privileged life. Why would a woman who's had three marriages, five children, and a wealth of personally enriching joyous and tragic experiences, spend her dying days reminiscing a shallow, two-talking, poor-excuse-of-a man? Ann's infatuation of Harris when she was 25 is understandable, excusable. But, as most of us know, it's the memories of the good men in our past we choose to preserve-- even of those whose feelings we were unable to reciprocate. Holding torches to cads quickly dissipates as we grow up wanting to meet and love the honest, well-intentioned, trustworthy men we hope to share our lives with.
Rating:
Summary: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
Review: Although Susan Minot attempts to weave a spell with her sophisticated use of language, the emptiness of her often interchangeable characters undercuts her ambition. This is the story of Ann Lord: a boring, shallow woman who has yet to outgrow her twenty-five year old self. Although she is sixty-five years old, on her deathbed, and drifting in and out of a delirium of morphine-induced memory, she seems to have learned nothing of the power of enduring love. Her children, her three husbands, are of minor importance compared to the power of a single weekend of great sex with a deceitful womanizer. I do not understand what I am supposed to take away from this novel. It is impossible to form an attachment to any character, because the prose is all surface glitter. I believe that most great books take their strength from the power of love, which is absent from this novel.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing and Tiresome
Review: I had such a hard time reading Evening. The premise fascinated me, but I just found it dull. I didn't so much mind the shifts in tense, but at times the story got so jumbled that I had a hard time keeping the characters and the time periods straight. I had heard such great things about this book, but in the end, I was simply disappointed.
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