I'm beginning to think that the mark of an Oprah's Book Club pick just means that a book will be long and depressing and written poorly. We Were the Mulvaneys had so many issues for me that I'm not sure why I didn't just put it down. I found the narrative to be overdescriptive with poor chapter transitions. It's verbal diarrhea meets A.D.D. Huge sections are a waste of paper and don't contribute to the story. Don't even get me started on the sentence structure. It's full of run on sentences than make little sense combined with a pile of sentence fragments. It's a jumbled disaster. In the end, I think taking all of the narrative away and pruning down the plot to Marianne's story from her own perspective would have been a better way to structure the book.