Author: Charlotte Silver (no website found)
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday
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. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
This novel sounded really intriguing from the blurb – which just means the blurb did its job in luring me in, but the reading of it was awful. It was one long description, and the description wasn’t even that interesting. These are girls who attended a co-ed school where clothing is supposedly optional, but which was evidently routinely worn. I can imagine some young girls relishing that prospect, but not most of them, and I can’t imagine many parents being in a rush to send their young girls to a school like that.
The girls evidently learned nothing from the school. When they graduate, they get jobs in bakeries and seem to have no interest in pursuing a career or doing anything other than sitting around and gossiping. There was nothing in this story to interest me at all. No characters to like, no one with whom to empathize, no one to root for, and nothing going on.
I don’t do covers. In fact I pay very little attention to them because my blog is about writing and unless the novel is self-published, the author has nothing whatsoever to do with the cover, but I have to say in this particular case that this cover is certainly one of, and possibly the most boring cover I’ve ever paid any attention to! OTOH, it really does, for once, fit the novel! The real problem here was that the story wasn’t interesting. It was slow and dull from the very beginning, and by chapter ten I still really had no idea of who the characters really were, who I was supposed to be paying any attention to, or where the story might be headed.
I made it through those first ten chapters (about a quarter of the way through) and I was skimming pieces of it by then. Nothing changed for that whole ten chapters: nothing got interesting, and nothing happened. This is without question one of the most boring and un-enticing novels I’ve ever read. I cannot in good faith recommend it based on what I read.
