I got this audiobook from my library because Greta Johnsen of Nerdette recommended it, but after this I’m going to have to rethink whether following her recommendations is such a good idea.
The author, Claire Lombardo, is from Oak Park, IL, the book is set in Oak Park, and I live in Oak Park, so that in itself was enough to recommend it to me.
Unfortunately, I was kind of disappointed, but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on why I didn’t like it.
I think, because the book takes place in my home town, I assumed I would be able to relate to these girls (there are 4 of them, which makes me wonder if Lombardo was going for a modern, middle-class version of Little Women).
The oldest, Wendy, is described as a sociopath by her mother as a toddler, but none of those manipulative traits appeared to carry over into adulthood, which makes me wonder about Lombardo’s knowledge of psychology and her ability to keep some semblance of consistency.
Wendy was a deeply troubled teenager, but there’s no indication at all as to what’s troubling her so much. She has a stable home, where things seem to be going pretty well, except for the fact that she hates her mother, but what teenager doesn’t?
Tragedy doesn’t strike until after she gets married, when she has a baby who’s stillborn and then her husband dies. Now that’s a reason to OD on alcohol.
Because Wendy has the good fortune to fall in love with and marry someone super wealthy, she gets to live out her widowhood in material comfort, prompting both Wendy and her mother to label her a “natural survivor”. That’s not survival skills, that’s just dumb luck.
Violet is the real sociopath in this book, but I’ll get back to her in a minute.
Liza really frustrated me because her big problem was that her partner was suffering from crippling depression and she didn’t know how to help him. I would believe that from any other character, but Liza was supposed to be a professor of psychology. How does a professor of psychology not know a good therapist? All that’s said about depression in relation to her degree is a textbook definition of depression, followed by the comment that the definition doesn’t tell you how to treat depression.
Not in intro to psych, no, but if you get a degree, you’ll learn about the benefits of exercise, various drugs, and even electroshock therapy. It feels like Lombardo took one psychology course and considers herself equipped to write about a character with a PhD in the field – clearly she is not.
Grace is the youngest and the one I relate to the most, even though I’m the oldest of my siblings. She just finished her undergrad degree and applied to a bunch of law schools, but got rejected from all of them. She constantly compares herself to her very successful sisters, and as a result, can’t bring herself to tell her family she didn’t get into any law school, so she lies about it, but then she has to keep the lie going for months, which is either very impressive on her part or very disappointing on the part of her parents. Do they think she’s paying for everything herself? How do they suppose she’s managing that? If they’re footing the bill, didn’t they think it odd that they never got a bill? Considering how much money is discussed in this book, it seems very unusual that the small matter of tuition is never, ever brought up.
Back to Violet. Violet had a one-night stand when she was an undergrad and got pregnant. Rather than tell her parents about it, she hid at Wendy’s house until she had the baby, which she promptly gave up for adoption. She told her parents she was studying abroad in France and seriously? What is with these parents?
Anyway, fast forward about 15 and a half years and the kid, Jonah, shows up. It was a closed adoption, but Wendy “just happened” to find her long-lost nephew in a group home in Oak Park. The parents who adopted him were both killed in a car crash when he was 4 and he’s been living in group homes and foster care ever since. His current foster parents are headed out of the country for some reason or other and it’ll be back to the group home for him if Violet or someone in her family doesn’t take him in.
Wendy agreed on a whim to have him live with her, but when he says something perfectly innocent, she gets all defensive because of her own insecurities and decides he can’t live with her. This poor kid.
So he goes to live with his grandparents, and when Violet hears about it she accuses Wendy of being a sociopath. Mind you, Violet refused to take in her own long-lost son because it would be too much of an inconvenience for her perfect life with her perfect husband and perfect children, so I can only assume that her calling Wendy a sociopath is the clearest case of projection I’ve ever seen.
Wendy does manage to coerce Violet into having Jonah over for dinner and Violet is hella elitist and prejudiced against her own son. She imagines a tour of his neighborhood would include houses he burned down for the fun of it and places where he tortured animals. WTF?
When Jonah is playing in another room with his two half brothers and Wendy hears screeching, she fears the worst: that their “generosity” in having her own son over for dinner is “repaid” by putting her children in danger. And, yes, she put it just like that: her children, clearly meaning only her two youngest.
Violet. Is. The. Worst.
Based on what I had heard about this book, I assumed Jonah entering the family was going to be the main plot, but it takes up a pretty small part of the book. Instead we have two timelines: one that starts with Jonah’s reappearance, and the other that starts when the girls’ mother meets their father and works it’s way up to the second timeline. We get perspectives from each of the girls and both their parents, but it’s not enough for me to understand what was causing Wendy so much pain as a teenager, and it certainly wasn’t enough for me to forgive Violet for being a terrible person.
What did you read/listen to this week? Anything else you had recommended to you that didn’t live up to expectations?