..damn ..just damn

This just didn’t hit for me. 

Strike one: The story was odd, as was the main character. Also, the narrative voice continually switched from conversational to more lofty prose, often from one sentence to the next and back again. Many of the more conversational ones were actually dependent clauses, which brought the immediate shift in tone from literary fiction-esque sentences to non-sentences into even sharper contrast. 

Strike two: The book touched on issues around those who grew up with money and those who didn’t, but didn’t delve deeply into them. This was fine, actually, as the MC idolized the old-money characters for most of it. However, her shift in opinion of those types of characters neglected to address topics like entitlement and never knowing financial struggle or hardship. She did, however, shift her thinking on theft from such people. So to see one side of her opinion about the “haves and have-nots” change, but not the other (at least not on the page), rang insincere. 

Strike three: The entire book was so predictable that when it met the tired tropes and twists without deviation, I was truly in disbelief — disbelief that anyone could be that unoriginal. 

thought this book was a great cozy end-of-summer read, though at times it felt slow and the dialogue unrealistic, as if striving for poetic over believable. But the writing style is compelling, and I enjoyed the way the writer explored fate through the lens of grief.