Three long names, seriously, just get yourself a nice, memorable name. No one is going to remember Deborah D'Aprix Sweeney, I don't care if you are Jim Harrison reincarnated. And a middle name with an apostrophe AND an X? Stupid. You can remember the name of the book but when you try and remember the name of the author, all you will say is something like "her first name was Debra or Cyndy or Sandra and then some name with an A or an X and then a last name like Teeny or Sweeney or Swenson or something." Clearly Cynthia and her agent did not think this through.
But back to the book! I just finished it, three minutes ago, and am not going to mull it over and give you the next day commentary. Here goes. If you know me, and some of you do, you know my skepticism, cynicism and normal negativism about bestsellers. I approach them cautiously if at all and I am primed to dislike them for the simple fact that they are on that best seller list. And yes, I understand that all of the above makes me a huge snob and a bit of a snarky bitch, I get all of that. But come on, when a book like that awful "Gone Girl" hits number one on the charts, even the now dead Casey Kasem would have wretched to announce its position as number one if he was a literary critic instead of a music panderer. Not to mention "Girl on a Train" which achieved the same notoriety. Is it any wonder I scoff at many best seller lists?
But back to the book! The first third is pleasant enough reading but it adheres to the constraints of the bestseller genre, roping you in with all these odd family members and this lump of money they all want and you know from page 35 it isn't going to end well but you read a bit more and you get sort of invested in one or two of the characters and so you read on. About page 100 you put it down and walk away for a day or two. You need a break, those characters are starting to bug you.
But you come back to the book! And for the next 50 pages or so you are lulled into that sort of cloudy realm of nice fiction where some things happen, nothing much, you catch up with the siblings, the kids, the scenarios and before you know it you are on page 200 and something has happened. The writing has gotten better, some of the characters are changing and the plot drifts away from the predictable into the area of not-sure-about-this and you like it a lot better. You keep reading.
By page 300 you are hooked! Now it's a good book! You might not like many of the characters but you can identify with some of them and you sympathize with a few and you can understand them. By the end of the book, you are sorry to see them leave but happy that their endings are not all sad.
Whew. How about that for a vague and dispassionate book review? But it's how I felt. The beginning is what you would expect, it tries to get you to like the people, the middle tosses in some small grenades and by the end some of them become fleshed out (so to speak) and you can like them. It was a good book. Not great, but entertaining.
I have an Advance Readers Edition (which makes me feel like an Advanced Reader!) courtesy of my brother and sister-in-law who work for SF library and can sometimes sneak copies of ARE books from the jaws of the library out into the free world and give them to their siblings, which is hush-hush, so don't tell anyone. That's how I have this book. I did note a couple of errors, small editing things, so I can easily say I read this as a proof reader, although there's no proof of that.
OK, over and out for now.
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