Author: Rosemary Harris
Publisher: Chestnut Hill Books
Rating: warty!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
Each year, five women: Abby, Clare, Jane, Rachael, Tina meet at a beach house (or maybe it's a bitch house? they were known as the Bitches of Brooklyn in their teens...) for a reunion and some fun and relaxation away from the men in their lives. Abby sometimes doesn't show up, as is the case this year. Instead, she sent them a basket of fattening goodies with a note saying she had run off with one of their men.... My immediate suspicion was that there would be a good and innocent explanation for this. The big question was whether I could stand to read the entire novel to get to it!
The story of the remaining four women's weekend at the beach house is wonderful. I enjoyed reading it immensely. It was eventful in at least one unexpected way, and it was entertaining and amusing. The problem began when they returned to the city, and the story ground to a jarring halt. The mystery of Abby's whereabouts and behavior continued to dominate their lives when it really should not have. These women were disturbingly insecure, which did nothing to endear me to them. None of them really knew what Abby meant by "one of your men". Since all of their men were also on trips, they could see that it was possible that Abby had literally run off with one, but did "men" equate with husband or boyfriend? Or did men simply refer to a business acquaintance or partner? Abby ran a PR business, so did "men" refer to some person not directly connected with them, but instead, a celebrity whom they all liked?
The story really began to drag for me when we started getting random flashbacks for some of these four women, which did nothing whatsoever to entertain me or to move the story forward. Indeed, any forward motion at that point was solely downhill since the flashbacks were much more like hold-backs in that they held the story back from being told. I really didn't care what history these women had. I was more interested in what was happening (or in this case not happening!) right now. Consequently, I skipped screen after screen of badly-formatted text (in the kindle version) because it wasn't interesting and did nothing for the plot or for me. I have to say that in this day and age, there is no excuse for a poorly formatted review copy.
The novel was weird in some regards. For example, there's a lot of talk about cussing, but no bad words beyond 'bitch' are ever used. I didn't get that. If you don't want cussing in your novel, fine, don't put it in there. I'm fine with that, but to go on and on about it and then never have the courage to use it is just weird to me. The word 'bitch' is no better or worse than any other cuss-word in my vocabulary: it's just as obnoxious, and to grant that word a privileged status, yet balk at other cuss-words is entirely illogical.
To cut a boring story short, this novel simply deteriorated from bad to worse to even worse. I don't want to tell any more for fear of giving away critical spoilers, but let me simply say that it held no surprises, and the way it went downhill into nothing but a series of vignettes of various gaggles of these girls drinking too much in dive bars and elsewhere made it a truly uninteresting read even when the grand reveal came. I recommend the first few chapters, but nothing beyond that. I felt completely let-down by the needlessly drawn-out ending.
