Rating: WARTY!
Normally I'm a big advocate of authors reading their own stories in audio books, because actors sure as hell are a disaster when it comes to doing this. Of course, just as some actors actually can do it, some authors cannot, and this author is one of those. The story was already maudlin to the point of being nauseous, and this author's whispery, sad, needy, whiny voice did not help one bit. I made it through only one disk (roughly one sixth the way through) so I can't speak for the whole novel, but after this one disk I was, "Check please, I'm outta here". It was obnoxious. It was nothing more than the movie Beaches over again. I actually liked that movie. This novel was an insult to it.
It looks like the main character has a child dying of cancer, but rather than focus on that, which if it had not been done tritely and predictably, might have made a story that hasn't already been done to death, the author takes us away to her main character's (yes, the kid, obnoxiously named Meggie, is dying but she's not the main character! I guess that's different!) story and delivers us to her entirely predictable friendship with a woman she initially dislikes. This woman (the narrator) is married, yet we hear this: "Until that moment, I hadn't realized how much I'd been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to."
If your husband isn't that person, then you married the wrong man, you hockey puck.
Despite having despised this woman five minutes before, they go off to see a movie which ought to tell you everything you ever need to know about this disaster: Sophie's Choice. Seriously, it was truly tedious to listening to the mindlessly boring minutiae of this woman's life, and her friend who is also dying of cancer. Let's load up on the cancer! Maybe I misunderstood what was going on form my brief listen, but that's what it seemed like to me, and it seemed awfully selfish, to me, that this old friend would be more important than her own daughter.
The author claims this story is rooted in a personal experience of her own, but if so she leads a tedious life. She didn't make this remotely engrossing or interesting. It was rite, predictable and boring as all hell.
