Carolina Moon (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

The Southern novel, with its soap opera-style plots and quaint characters and drawling dialogue, is really wearing thin for me. It just seems so tired, like even it is weary of repeating the same plots, characters and settings. I found this example to be particularly tiresome. There are too many characters to keep track of, so you don’t care about anyone very much, and thus you find it difficult to muster up any interest in their entangled love lives, which forms the basis of the plot. I wouldn’t have finished this at all if it wasn’t a signed edition that I wanted to keep.

Cute but not fabulous. McCorkle gives us several new and old residents of fictional Fulton, NC, including a woman who has opened a smoking cessation clinic, her friend's possibly crazy daughter, a handyman shattered by his father's suicide, and a retiring postmaster who has been reading a series of undeliverable letters for years. Disparate stories come together along with unsurprising revelations. I found several of the characters to be well drawn, and I cared just a little what might happen to them, but not a whole lot. I had guessed the significance of the pictures fairly early on, but it was a nice technique. The opinions that the characters had of each other were entertaining. A decent, light read.

It's no "Crash Diet," and I was therefore disappointed.