I almost dreaded turning up to my reading group today as I had chosen this novel for us to read and had found it boring beyond belief. Every 353 pages had been a struggle. Normally, I like character driven books and Carol Shields (another author who writes books about ordinary peoples' lives) is a personal favourite of mine, but this book took the genre to its limit. The characters are unlikeable, way too self analytical and quite frankly I didn't care what happened to them. Brenda was insensitive to her husand Daniel's problems, Jake was rude and I couldn't even like the mother Ellen. Probably the only character I had any sympathy for was the father. Having said that, I do think this author has great potential and if she had got a better sense of her characters and made us feel more for them, it could have been a great read.
So as I say, I thought my reading group were going to hate it. What a surprise - about half agreed with me but the other half had really got into it. We had a fantastic discussion about the characters and why they were how they are and in fact, the discussion left me thinking there was more to the novel than I'd originally read into it. Most of us agreed it needed more editing but it wasn't disliked in the way I thought it would be. It will be interesting to see what Pitlor produces next...

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