charlottesometimes's Reviews (3.33k)

This seems a very slight book to be considered for the Women’s Prize. The characters are just place holders for the bare-bones plot, the tone is aggressively sentimental, and some of the dialogue is cringingly unfunny. It’s not terrible, but I don’t know what would make it stand out from thousands of others as worthy of a prize.

Addendum: The ending was so bad I actually said “Oh God!” out loud in an empty room. The sickening fluffiness of everyone and everything was bad enough, Plus the character whose only method of communicating was malapropism, and the unfathomable behaviour of several characters. And then there was the presentation of the act of bearing a child as something magical that basically immediately elevates you to sainthood. 

But nothing was as bad as that ending :-( So cheesy. So unrealistic. So telegraphed. So tasteless. 

Some odd choices. Why was so much time spent on the least interesting part of the story - the falling in love with the husband? Meanwhile the ‘mystery’ was spaced out across the book, but had limited actual page time, and was swiftly wrapped up after a perfunctory investigation. Even the character themselves seemed rather disinterested. They also received rather short-shrift in terms of motivation and inner life, unless they were Jean. And even she, for all the time spent on her, was essentially just the stock lonely spinster with a secret tragedy and a burdensome mother.

Also, the ending felt rather jarring. Possibly purposely, but I’m afraid I don’t really understand what that purpose was.

Should’ve been more interesting to read than it was. The premise was strong, but after the one instigating incident the book mainly constituted generations of characters discovering/trying to hide the original secret whilst a series of coincidences made this increasingly difficult. No character had their own independent existence, and the story simply circled around the same point for hundreds of pages, but never went any deeper into issues/feelings/implications. 

Absolutely ridiculous.