Rating: WARTY!
I got this novel from Net Galley as an ARC, and I was grateful, because it sounded good from the blurb, but this is the problem: many do, few are. This one was not, which saddened me, because it started out really well and had too good of a premise for it to fall apart as it did. One of the main problems, in addition to it being too 'one note' (especially for a story rooted in music!), was that the the two main characters, a woman and her niece, started out as reasonably smart people who unfortunately proceeded to get ever more dumb as the story progressed.
It's hard to explain this without giving away spoilers, which I'd rather not do. I don't mind a story where someone who starts out dumb, or naïve or ignorant - however you want to characterize it - improves over the course of the story. I don't even mind a character who stays dumb throughout the story if they're interesting or amusing, but when it goes the other way, and they just get dumber, it's like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. Women already have enough to deal with without being characterized like this, inadvertently or otherwise, in one novel after another.
Let me try and give one example without giving too much away. At one point the women are dealing with a sleazy used-car salesman (talk about cliché), and he recognizes who they are and starts effectively blackmailing (or bullying if you prefer) them in return for what they want. Lise is actually at the point of negotiating to buy a useless wreck of a car from him because they need something that's in the car, rather than simply walk away and then return at night and take it! I hasten to add that it's nothing that anyone would miss the next day - or even notice it was missing - and it has no absolutely zero value to anyone but Ariel.
I wouldn't even characterize this particular thing as stealing at all, and anyone who didn't have a rusted fuel pump for a heart would have let Ariel have it. Yet despite this and despite everything they've actually done so far, it never occurs to a one of them to sneak back that night. This was not only out of character, it was a complete betrayal of the characters, and for me it spoke direly against the competence of this woman who was supposed to be managing Callie's millions. If she can't even manage something like this, of what use is she? That's the point at which I quit reading, because I was so disappointed in these characters for whom I'd had such high hopes as the novel began.
The story here is that Lise is the older sister of Callie, and there is a rift between them which was for good reason and which never healed. Now it's too late because Callie, who became a popular country music star, is dead and Lise is named very nearly a sole beneficiary of Callie's will and also guardian of her niece, Ariel, whom she hasn't even seen for a decade or so.
Right from the start, this whole charade show is a disaster for Lise, because of the ridiculous publicity surrounding Callie's death, the farce of a funeral, and the psychotic money-grubbing by all and sundry. Rather than deal with this, Lise runs away, following Ariel who is desperate to discover who her real father is. The sad thing is that it's pretty obvious almost from the start: both who he is and how this will end, so there's really no suspense here, which brings us to the one note: one town after another, one lowlife high-school boyfriend after another, one paternity test after another, and while there is some variety, there's nowhere near enough to stop this from falling into a rut.
One writing issue I noticed was in the main character balking at hotel coffee, and then I read, "...then I ease out of the room in search of a hotel coffee kiosk, hoping against hope it will be open at this hour...". I wasn't sure what to make of this! First we get the 'cops-in-the-donut-shop' cliché that all hotel coffee is universally bad, but as soon as we learn this, we discover that she's going off in search of a coffee kiosk. What guarantee is there that this will be better? Why not go off in search of a starbucks or some other venue that promises to be better? Why not go to the store and buy your favorite brand if the hotel coffee is so bad? Why not step out of the rut altogether and have the hotel coffee be great? This made little sense to me, and it's not a big issue, but it's one more thing to consider when you're telling a story.
I didn't like any of these characters after the first few chapters, least of all Callie who I never did like. The two main ones began as likable, at least the aunt and niece did, but Lise's constant whiny attitude and litany of complains coupled with and Ariel's endless moodiness and bitchiness wore thin after very little time. Given how alienated both women were from Callie each in their own way, their tidal and maudlin grief had no more foundation than do the sands under rolling breakers, and so I found no authenticity here. It felt like they were simulating grieving rather than actually grieving.
The novel is told in first person, which I dislike because it's rarely done well, it has appalling limitations, and it's downright annoying. The limitation of this method, with which far too many writers are mysteriously obsessed, is demonstrated handsomely here when, every few chapters, we hear the discordant clunk of a third person PoV being dropped. It didn't work. Almost worse than this, there were flashbacks galore, which didn't work for me either, and I took to skipping them in short order. By the time I was fifty percent into this I realized that I wasn't into this at all, and I gave up on it.
Talking of discordance, I think the very saddest thing of all about this novel is that it was about the aftermath of the death of a music star. Her daughter was in her teens and no doubt was very much into music, and her estranged sister was a music teacher, but the story had no music in it - and no soul. There was nothing even related to music save for some sparsely scattered partial lyrics in one or two places. For a novel which was rooted in music, I was expecting much more and it wasn't there. I'm not even a country music fan - which brings me to the next problem: the publicity which Callie's death garnered.
I can see a major country music star making big headlines outside of the country music world, but I didn't get the impression from the novel that Callie was quite that big. She was no Carrie Underwood, Shania Twain, Alison Krauss or whatever - not from the way she was described here. Even if she had been, that doesn't automatically mean that everyone, everywhere in the country, no matter where you go, would recognize her daughter, or her absentee sister who had been far from the limelight for ten years. Country music is popular in the US, but it's not run-away-above-everything-else popular, yet now, suddenly, and everywhere they go, someone not only recognizes these people, none of whom are stars, but manages to take an embarrassing picture which makes headlines. It simply wasn't credible.
So it can be no surprise by now that I didn't consider this a worthy read and cannot recommend it. I'm sorry, because the idea was a good one. It just wasn't done well. I think if this had been told from Ariel's PoV (but in third person, please!) and Lise had been left out of it entirely, it might have been a better story. I think this writer has some great novels in her though, and is worth watching.
On that score, I'd recommend she get in touch with Goodreads! If you type 'Closer Home' into the search window and click, it will not find this author's novel. It will find every novel that has 'close to home' in the title, but forget about 'closer home'! That's simply not good enough in my opinion. You have to type the author's name, Kerry Anne King, to get 'closer home' to show, and even then the title lists after "Twelve Years A Slave"! What the hell is up with that?! Amazon brings it to the top of the list if you search for Closer Home in books, and B&N puts it in the second row, but Goodreads can't find it? Goodreads needs a better search engine.
