Susannah B. Lewis

i really hated pretty much everything about this. first of all, it turns out that i'm not the audience for it because every other paragraph was "pray on this" or "god will show you" or "let god decide" or "this is where we prayed together" and i can't really abide that. i thought that since the opening scene was a funeral that it might have been okay that there was immediately religion-talk, but it only got worse. putting that aside, this was still terrible. the writing is poor and full of cliches. there is no pacing to speak of, at all. the amount of time that passes is anyone's guess. there is no exploration of feeling or emotion, although there is lots of talk about what the characters may or may not be feeling. (but with no evidence, unless you count what they're saying.) they entire premise of the book, that this newly divorced woman who is grieving her mother's death moves back into her mother's small town home and finds solace in the older ladies' group she had been a part of doesn't even manifest until the very very end. she joins this group, yes, and there are maybe three meetings that we hear about briefly but the only real function of this group was to bring the main character back to church. which, in this end, is all this actually was. it is propaganda for returning to the church and letting jesus save you. but even if it wasn't, it's terrible anyway.… (altro)