Rating: WARTY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
I simply could not get into this novel at all. I loved the title and the idea, and even the cover photograph, which was exquisite, but the actual text seemed so rambling I honestly could not follow what was going on.
It began perfectly fine and I was really getting into it as these two women, approaching middle age, were evidently conducting some sort of casual lesbian relationship even as one of them seemed to be desperately searching for a man to latch onto. The other seemed quite happy with the status quo, but evidently her friend was uncomfortable with living out the rest of her life like that, or at least felt she ought to have more, and was trying to talk her lover into finding a man herself.
From there it seemed to quickly explode into a score of different directions with characters popping up out of nowhere and I lost track of who was who and what was what. The writing style seemed like some sort of free-association, stream-of-conscious affair which completely lost me. I would have been happy to have read a whole novel about those two women and no one else, but they became quickly buried under the other characters, in whom I had zero interest, so I gave up reading it. I can't commend this based on what I read of it, even though the beginning was remarkable and quite captivating.
