Rating: WARTY!
This is a case of a novel where I found the author's name far more interesting than the novel she wrote! This is a story of two stepsisters, one of whom doesn't know the other exists, because unknown to her mother, her father is a bigamist. James Witherspoon was already married when he met Gwen and married her, and they had Danalyn (that may be two names - it's impossible to tell in an audiobook!) thereafter. Gwen and Dana have always known that they were the 'other women'. James's wife 1.0 never did. Unfortunately, the only thing which was " breathtaking " about it was how slowly it moved.
The blurb says, "Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon's two families-the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode." If that's so, it's the slowest explosion ever to occur in the entire history of explosions, and therein lay the problem I had with this - nothing happened! I was desperate for the relationship between these two to begin, and it never did - not in the first fifth or so of this novel, and not in any meaningful way.
After that point, I gave up out of frustration and boredom. The author was far more interested in delving, Stephen King-like, into the minutiae of family life and into the antediluvian histories of these families. All I wanted to read about was what I was promised: two exploding sisters! Don't tell me you're going to have an explosive relationship and then lull me to sleep with tedium without ever getting around to actually digging deeply into the relationship! I can't recommend this despite the sweet voices of the narrators, Rosalyn Coleman and Heather Simms.
