My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is a book in serious need of some editorial attention. There were very many punctuation and typo errors throughout the book. Even the book’s Blurb had a word missing in the first line. I found at least two instances where two characters’ names had been obviously mixed up, i.e. Jane and Jenny. We are told in the Blurb that it takes place in 1935 Missouri, just 6 years after the Great Depression. But there is no mention of that in the book. Thousands of people across the world were affected but in the story only Darlene seems to have been troubled by a serious personal incident. If it is meant to be a historical novel set in the USA, I would have expected at least one or two mentions about Hoover and/or Roosevelt. The main gist of the tale appears to be how strong friendships can often survive through many years, and how this affection can help restore a person’s faith in themselves, enough to go on with their future lives.
However, for me the most serious criticism of the story was a severe shortage of showing events, incidents and emotions by almost all the characters. It was a case of serious ‘telling’ all the way through. The reader is told in the minutest and largely irrelevant or verbose detail, almost every action that a character takes – and then told again. Meal times, in particular, were described in detail, and then once more, just a few phrases later, basically saying the same thing. There did not seem to be any evil or ‘bad’ characters to suddenly grip the reader’s attention. In fact no-one got angry because they were all so polite to each other, making the dialogue much too pious and tedious. If the tale had been taking place in some kind of austere Puritan or maybe Quaker society then the formal politeness may have become more obviously necessary. Their faith in God was something quite apparent but the efforts to remain so blatantly inoffensive to anyone became a cliché. The fact that grace was spoken at each meal time was a hint of their strong Christian faith suppose. There was so little for readers to find intriguing one way or another.
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