Whole lot of sub plots, beautiful writing and the novel moves. Each chapter has you wanting more. One negative was Lydia's voice which I questioned if it actually sounded like a teenager. Nonetheless, a great read on family. ( )

I liked parts if this book and it was well written. Maybe if I had read it before the "me too" movement I would have felt differently. Wanted to read about stronger women. For example, Henrietta, the grandmother, smart, a college professor, had written a book which embarrassed her for the rest of her life. Rather than move on her only reference for her existence was her now deceased husband. There were many other things in the book that bothered me but don't want to get caught up in criticizing it. Suffice it to say, well written but characters I don't need to know about. ( )

This is the story of three generations of women in one family - Henrietta (grandmother), Oona (daughter), and Lydia (granddaughter), all of whom are sad and/or distressed in some way. Contains lots of inner musings and was boring to read. I didn't find any of the characters particularly interesting, nor did I find it "funny" as so many of the critics' blurbs on the cover said. I was left with just a blah feeling. ( )

I received this novel as part of a promotion.

Three women in varying stages of life and varying conflicts that occupy their lives form the thematic center of this novel. Henrietta, a post-modern feminist having given up academia to live on a farm in rural Massachusetts with her chef husband, is recently widowed and facing the very real threat of poverty. Her daughter Oona has separated from her pothead husband and is coming to grips with her loneliness, the prospect of dating other men, and her mother's reluctance to end her mourning. Her daughter Lydia, a gifted teen, is reeling from the fallout of having a nude picture of her stolen and published on the internet, and is back home, partly to hibernate and mourn, partly to plan her revenge, and partly to plan her future, all while having to deal with her father's moroseness and bitterness and her mother's absence from her home.

The novel's chapters alternate points of view of its characters, and the author shines in elucidating their personalities. Take for example the first sentences that open the first of Lydia's chapters: "It was Monday, not that it mattered, rain falling, weak light through the dead trees on Mount Thumb....The iron arched gates of Hartwell Academy passed overhead, rusted and bearing a carved Latin inscription that meant either "Truth and Wisdom in Learning" or something like "Forget What You Thought: This Is The Place Where You Will Truly Actually Learn to Feel Deep Shame and Humiliation about Your Body." This perspective perfectly captures Lydia's cynicism, mood and frame of mind, teenage sarcasm and angst, and cloudy dim view of her future.

Not much happens over the course of about a week, which is the novel's purview, but whereas in other books I have reeled from the sheer boredom of passing pages and pages with no plot development whatsoever (see my review of The Fifth Petal), here the author captures the reader's attention with the inner and outer conflicts of the characters so well I barely notice nothing has happened in 5 pages.

The writing is funny, touching, lively, and vibrant. The characters are complex. Lydia isn't, for example, your typical teenager. She has the typical cynicism, yet still yearns for her mother's presence and and her father's well-being. Spencer is a pothead with a deep addiction problem he won't admit to, but he also has a fierce undying protectiveness of his baby that sends both of them on a road trip to solve the problem at hand. The passage where he explains to his daughter how to him she is still his little baby girl is tremendously moving, maybe more so because Lydia, and perhaps the reader, hadn't thought him capable of such deep thought on the subject. Another particularly moving element involves Oona's actions surrounding a note her father had written to her mother, whose outcome rounds out the last pages of the novel.

What we do for others; what we do to others, and the complicated and sometimes tragic consequences of our working through our shortcomings and challenges: these are the great themes of the novel. I was reminded of other novels like "The Interestings" and "Fates and Furies," which also deal very well with relationships and inner struggles. ( )