Set against the backdrop of gentrifying 1950s San Francisco, On the Rooftop is novel about a mother whose dream of musical stardom for her three daughters collides with the daughters’ ambitions for their own lives. Ruth, Esther, and Chloe have been singing and dancing in harmony since they could speak. Thanks to the rigorous direction of their mother Vivian, they’ve become a girl group whose shows are the talk of the town. Vivian has scored a once-in-a-lifetime offer from a talent manager, but sometime between the hours of rehearsal and the weekly gigs, the girls have become women, women with dreams that their mother cannot imagine. Vivian, who has always maintained control, will have to confront the parts of her life that threaten to splinter.

This was the first book my new girl gang book club read and it was fun to kick off a new book club together! The premise of this story was interesting but I found myself having a hard time getting into the story. This was better in the second half as the plot got moving a bit more, but overall it was slow. Our book club all agreed that there were a lot of plot points and background information that weren’t fully developed, and had those points been fleshed out a bit better we would have liked the book more. It was hard for me to like Vivian’s character for this reason; there are little snippets of her backstory that are dropped in the book, but having a fuller picture of her history would have helped make her motivations more understandable.