katefogil

Perhaps it was my love of her other book, Eat, Pray, Love, that made me not completely love this book. If 1/2 stars were an option, I would have gone with 3 1/2 stars, so I'm rounding up. It was an interesting read...characters were well written, but there was no one I was emotionally invested in (although I loved Kitty, the drunken "aunt"). It seems that perhaps there is more commonality between classes than between geographic groups...this was about a small, lower-middle class community on the east coast who were dependent on lobsters to get by, but it could have easily been the small, middle class community in Iowa that I grew up in that was dependent on the weather & crops to get by. It was the small-town anecdotes that I found most entertaining. It almost seemed as if this book was written in stages & left that way...several chapters overlapped on information & character description. The fact that Ruth was given so many opportunities that she didn't take advantage of (out of spite? misguided loyalty to her father?) threw me a little bit. While I saw the (predictable) ending coming before they went to the wedding on Courne Haven, I was a little annoyed that she didn't want to see more of the world before settling down. I'm sitting here typing myself into a lower rating for this book...I'll stop now.

2023-06-21 14:05