Main Characters Not Really Likable

Libby is a young British writer who has had a crush on an American actor for a very long time. She comes up with the idea of writing a book and sending it to him, hoping he’ll be so enthralled with it he’ll want to collaborate with her to make it a screenplay. She does write the book, and he in fact does invite her to Los Angeles to collaborate.

I had a hard time getting into this book and caring about the characters. Chapters alternate between several characters in the first-person present. As I got toward the end of the book, I wondered whether that unusual tense was part of what made me not be able to immerse myself in the story. Unfortunately, much of the book seems just to be telling about events, with significant blocky sections of paragraphs, not showing them through dialogue and action. The whole tone of the book just came across as strange to me. It didn’t help that I didn’t particularly like either of the main characters, Thom or Libby. Both suffer from a certain degree of narcissism and selfishness. Libby doesn’t realize the effects her actions have on others. I also found their age difference to be a little off-putting. The end of the book seemed off to me as well, and it just seemed to come out of nowhere.

I received a free copy of this book, but that did not affect my review.

Hero Deserves Better than Snarky Heroine

We meet the heroine, Susan, as she is standing in a church as the maid of honor at her best friend’s wedding. Susan herself has recently become engaged to Pete, a big-hearted southern gentleman. Susan is a hard-driving career woman, and she doesn’t quite seem to have adjusted to Pete’s big southern family. How will she and Pete’s relationship evolve during their engagement and marriage?

Susan, the narrator and heroine, is a difficult woman for me to like. She’s got a real hard edge to her, and she seems to not fully appreciate her gift in Pete and his extended family. She comes across as critical of the small southern town and the people in it, to the point of being insulting. She and Pete supposedly love each other, but as we come in just after they’ve gotten engaged, it’s not really clear how these two very different people came to love each other. Pete’s a solid family-man type, kind and loving, while Susan places more importance on her career and is definitely the yang to his yin, so to speak. Probably because I couldn’t identify with the heroine, I couldn’t really appreciate any chemistry between the couple. I just kept reading, hoping that she would change her stripes and become the kind of woman that a man like Pete deserved.

Naive Girl Comes of Age in 1930s New Zealand

We meet Margaret, the protagonist of the story, in 1935 when she is on a ship heading from England to New Zealand just after her brother died on the journey. Margaret’s relationship with her parents is difficult at times. She starts working in New Zealand and soon moves out on her own. What will happen to an inexperienced young woman living on her own at that time?

I think it is interesting that the author chose to fictionalize the story of one of her distant relatives. She only knew a little bit about her but developed a story that touches on the struggles that women faced in that era, especially women with an independent spirit. Margaret was definitely a green girl when she came to New Zealand, and the author explores that in vivid detail. Margaret eventually gets involved with men and discovers sex, which goes on to shape her life in a variety of ways. She also becomes a singer in a jazz club.

The story is written in the first-person past. There were a couple of problems with this. First, that point of view lends itself to an excess of narrative prose versus dialog; that did happen here. Second, the author chose to write it in a style as if the narrator was telling it looking back on her life rather than as she lived it. Using this technique, the author lends the narrator a degree of omniscience about herself; the narrator comments at critical junctures, stating that they are important turning points for her. I’m not accustomed to this use of the first person, so I found the effect to be distancing for me.

This book is very steamy. When the book starts, Margaret is truly naive and innocent, but that quickly changes, and we are there every step of the way as she learns about her body and how to interact sexually with men.

The author is Australian, and I will admit that I do not know the differences between American and Australian grammar and punctuation rules. That being said, the book seemed filled with those errors, mostly revolving around commas. They were missing at the end of long introductory phrases, at the separation point between independent clauses in a compound sentence, and before the direct address of a person (along with other issues). There are also a few places where punctuation around dialogue does not look correct.

That said, I think this is a fascinating piece of women’s literature that gives us a window on a time and place that is different to our own.

Potentially Good Story Ruined by Bad Grammar and Punctuation

The book opens at Claire’s funeral. Soon, her son is given a box of diaries and other things of his mother’s that will help explain some questions the son has about her, his father states. The bulk of the book, except for a little at the beginning and the end, relates Claire’s later teenage life.

I had a problem with this book on a variety of levels. First, I didn’t really see the need to bracket Claire’s story with the modern context of having it seen through her son’s eyes after her death; this added nothing to the story as not much was done in either of the small modern-day portions. The end, especially, could have been so much more (and have been the reason for the modern parts) if he had some interaction with the young man mentioned in the diaries who was so pivotal in his mother’s early life. That would have made this modern-day bracketing make sense. But as that did not happen, it seems rather pointless.

Another odd thing I found about the book was that even though the son is supposedly reading these papers and diaries, the story itself is related as any regular story would be, with a fair amount of dialogue. I don’t know about you, but when I write in a diary or a journal, I don’t write dialogue! So, unless the son has an excellent and spot-on imagination, this isn’t actually a good representation of what supposedly happened with his mother.

The most significant issue I had, though, was that the book was poorly written from a grammar, punctuation, and usage standpoint. So much so that I was utterly distracted from reading the story. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such terribly inconsistent and non-edited work in publication. I did receive an ARC of this book, so I double checked the Amazon preview to see if the final book had been edited before I wrote this portion of the review. The preview seems to be no different from the version that I read. The author appears to be British, but most of the rules of grammar and punctuation are the same between these two variants of English. She seemed to have no understanding whatsoever of how to punctuate dialogue, and there was a lot of conversation in this book. Capitalization is wrong, commas are wrong, and other random punctuation is thrown in around dialogue. Both in dialogue and narrative sections, sometimes ending punctuation is left out. Word choice was occasionally wrong, like bare vs. bear. It seemed hardly a paragraph went by without an error, making it so I could barely concentrate on the story.

The story itself about the coming of age of a young girl had its merits, but these were overshadowed by the structural problems of the book as well as the grammar, punctuation, and usage issues.