julesmq's reviews
49 reviews

The premise immediately intrigued me: domestic espionage in the small-town American South with a mix of romance woven in. The story did not disappoint. It’s lighthearted in that there’s no high stakes and no violence, but it still kept me guessing until the final revelations. I even fell for the red herring! That always makes a story satisfying to me. The author was new to me, and I probably won’t seek out her previous bibliography in YA fiction, but I’ll look forward to another adult lit book if she writes one.  

The author tries too hard to speak on white supremacy (at present and through history) but it’s just another white author on the usual soapbox. 

I suppose this was the perfect story for a captive audience, as I listened to it every day while in a hospital. It was interesting enough that I wanted to return every time that I was able to lie down and rest. And because I listened to the audiobook and because I was always very tired, it often lulled me to sleep. But when I got home again, I just couldn’t muster any desire to read. Once again, I went to the Internet and found a summary of all the chapters to know how the story ended. And that satisfied me just fine. I even read the summary of the following two books and have no desire to actually tackle them. I know enough and will be just fine watching the TV adaptation when it arrives. This has been the state of my reading in these last few months of 2022: starting a story but taking a shortcut to the end. 

I really did enjoy what I read of this book, but as with so many others at the end of 2022, I just couldn’t keep reading long enough to finish it. Life just took a weird turn this year. I’ll come back to this at a different time in my life. 

Five chapters in and I didn’t like the details of the murder nor the smattering of characters that were tossed around. Too many people of unknown consequence, plus a supposed sexual component to the murder (or set up to be), and none of it kept my interest.

So boring. As with all other Taylor Jenkins Reid books that I’ve read, none can measure up to “Daisy Jones and the Six.” Most have been predictable and boring, though I enjoyed “Malibu Rising” the most because of its sibling story. But this one didn’t even make tennis exciting, and that was its entire focus! It felt like a lame effort at ripping off the Williams sisters’ stories, and it just fell very flat for me. I couldn’t get past the halfway mark, but I did read the plot summary to see how it ended. Unfortunately, it ended exactly the way I assumed it would. Confirmation that I needn’t have wasted any more time on this book. 

As with the last novel I read by Taylor Jenkins Reid, I was instantly intrigued by the premise but somewhat disappointed in the execution. I’m beginning to think nothing will ever measure up to “Daisy Jones and the Six.” I had my suspicions about “The Seven Husbands…” after seeing several recent lackluster reviews among online friends, so it didn’t surprise me when I didn’t want to continue reading this book after the first few chapters. 

It’s true that the Evelyn Hugo character is intriguing, but, as in “Malibu Rising”, the extra viewpoint (this time it was Evelyn’s biographer) quickly became tedious and simply uninteresting. So once again I read the SuperSummary and skipped forward to the end of the book. I did read the final 15 or so chapters, as well as skimming through another 15 or so before that, so I feel confident in knowing the bulk of the story. And that’s really all that matters to me this time. I’m content having read 50% of the novel and knowing how it all ended. Just not sure when I became that kind of reader, though. 

Jenkins Reid is a good storyteller, but too often I want some of her extra storylines excised from the final book. 

The idea of the novel intrigued me — a summer-only affair that recurs for 28 years — but the first chapters reminded me how melodramatic Hidlerbrand’s books are. And I wasn’t in the right frame of mind after all. Instead, my curiosity was satisfied by reading the Super Summary and returning the book to the library. No regrets.