This book is just me flinging my hands up in the air a la the "Well I GUESS" meme.
First, the good stuff: it's really readable! I remembered why I enjoyed Good in Bed and In Her Shoes back in the early-2000s! But man. Those books were denigrated as being 'chick lit,' which is unfair and sexist and all that, but I also spent most of this book feeling like it was written by someone who was out of her depth, honestly. It's a multi-decade story about two sisters, Jo and Bethie, and if those sound like familiar names for sisters, wait until you find out that Jo wanted to be a writer but then gave it up and got married to a man who didn't deserve her.
The story reads like a version of Forrest Gump that follows two Jewish sisters from Detroit who aren't right next to history the way Forrest was, but who experience every single cultural shift as if they are. It also felt a lot like The Heidi Chronicles, if the protagonists had literally no self-awareness and the dramatic irony was thick and never-ending. The sisters simultaneously experience everything terrible and have insanely good luck, which could just be the mark of it being fiction rather than history, but what it really felt like was that nothing had any real weight or true consequence. And that's before we get to the current modern day generation, where Jo's three daughters all fill these cardboard cutout roles as representatives of Millennials, and man. Everything is shoe-horned in here, and it did not come together for me at all. The more I think about it, the grumpier I get, honestly.
Grade: C
First, the good stuff: it's really readable! I remembered why I enjoyed Good in Bed and In Her Shoes back in the early-2000s! But man. Those books were denigrated as being 'chick lit,' which is unfair and sexist and all that, but I also spent most of this book feeling like it was written by someone who was out of her depth, honestly. It's a multi-decade story about two sisters, Jo and Bethie, and if those sound like familiar names for sisters, wait until you find out that Jo wanted to be a writer but then gave it up and got married to a man who didn't deserve her.
The story reads like a version of Forrest Gump that follows two Jewish sisters from Detroit who aren't right next to history the way Forrest was, but who experience every single cultural shift as if they are. It also felt a lot like The Heidi Chronicles, if the protagonists had literally no self-awareness and the dramatic irony was thick and never-ending. The sisters simultaneously experience everything terrible and have insanely good luck, which could just be the mark of it being fiction rather than history, but what it really felt like was that nothing had any real weight or true consequence. And that's before we get to the current modern day generation, where Jo's three daughters all fill these cardboard cutout roles as representatives of Millennials, and man. Everything is shoe-horned in here, and it did not come together for me at all. The more I think about it, the grumpier I get, honestly.
Grade: C
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