Rating: WARTY!
I have no idea who this is written for. Not me, that's for sure because it rubbed me up the wrong way from the off. It was first person to begin with which is typically a poor choice of voice, and it's especially a poor choice when the voice comes off as fingernails on a chalk board.
If I'd known that the author was a professor of creative writing at some college I would have avoided it like the plague because sorry experience has taught me well that books from authors like that paradoxically tend to be dreary and uncreative at best. Kate Christensen's review in the NYT says it wonderfully - and in an otherwise positive review! She wrote: "Nothing much happens here, plot-wise." I couldn't have put it better myself. The blurb had made this sound interesting though. It was about a 43-year-old woman who almost simultaneously separated from her newly-revealed gay husband, and was involved in a serious accident that left her with several broken bones. In true fictional tradition, she went running...well hobbling anyway, back to her hometown.
That's about as far as I got. I'm not normally into that genre - the running back home like a little kid story that is so unfortunately common these days, but this one sounded like it might be different. It was different in that it was not fictional, but it wasn't in any other way, and the screeching, laughing too loud story-telling style grated on my every nerve. I honestly could not stand to read it beyond the first few pages, and I ditched it in short order. I'm done with this so-called creative writing professor.
