That's a bit like me saying I like you because you live in a pretty house, yes? Sigh.
The story, set in a contemporary UK village with a mystery at its heart, is a reunion/reckoning/reconciliation tale of sorts involving four ladies. We have the family matriarch Lillian, who is a cozy mystery writer succumbing to the ravages of old age; her New Age/free-spirited daughter Poppy, who abandoned her very young daughter to Lillian’s care so she could chase her dreams; Zoe, Poppy’s artistic, unforgiving and now full-grown daughter, who hates her mother with unwavering ferocity (remember that when I get to commenting on the end); and Isabel, Zoe’s secretive teenage daughter who is trying to overcome a mysterious trauma apparently inflicted by her friends. The four women come together when Zoe’s best friend in the UK, Diana, suddenly disappears, and they try to sort out what happened to her.
The mystery feels more like an excuse to bring them together rather than a real event, but okay.
Because I identified with three of the four female generational characters I sympathized with them. Mostly with Lillian and Isabel, as I’ve dealt with issues similar to theirs, and they were the most genuine-to-me voices in the story. I also resonated somewhat with Zoe, although at times her extreme hatred of Poppy didn’t seem plausible, given her intelligence plus what the mother actually did. When you factor in how empathetic and compassionate Zoe is toward just about everyone else the whole scenario simply doesn't compute. I'd have tweaked that grudge a lot if it had been my story. As for Poppy, she seemed the most fake of all four characters -- stereotypical New Age dingbat in a nutshell -- and I didn't care for how she subtly blamed all her crap on her mother, who it seems spent most of her life cleaning up after Poppy.
I liked the first and last chapters of the story, I think, as much as I was able to with all the emotional wrecking balls flying at me. For the most part Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Sage Cooper, who like most of the author’s romantic male characters is very exotic and fetching, kept me interested. The mystery of what happened to Diana was sidelined by all the reckonings among the family, and seemed to be on the scanty side. I think more interesting mystery aspects and way, way less angst would have served the reader better. But it’s women’s fic, not a mystery, so we must expect the persistence of wrecking balls.
In the end I felt the book never got hold of me as intended. It could be that my own rocky moods and issues influenced that; I tend to wall out that sort of thing when I’m struggling with my own unhappiness. Women's fictional relationships with each other mostly bore me, too; I find most women are not as they are portrayed in books by women writers (but male writers don't get it right, either. Maybe no one can write us properly.) There's some yearning in these type of stories for women to be much more than they are, and that strikes me as misleading and occasionally sadistic. The final revelation of exactly what Isabel suffered was over-the-top, and seemed more like a soapbox rant at the dangers of social media. I also didn’t like how things worked out with Zoe and Poppy at all; given Zoe's hatred it felt quite unrealistic and, in the end, far too sugary.
I don’t know if I should recommend this one or not. Maybe I need to stop reading women’s fiction until my head is in a better place and I'm not so darn prickly.
Comments