Intended Audience: Teens
Genre: Real Life
Notes for parents: Some mature scenes, language, underage drinking.
The Back Cover
My
name is Adrienne Haus, and I’m a survivor of a mother-daughter book club. For
three of the four of us daughters, membership wasn’t voluntary. My mother
signed me up because I was stuck in West New Hope all summer with my knee in a
brace instead of going to camp with my best friend. CeeCee Christiansen’s
parents forced her to join after canceling her trip to Paris when they found
out she’d bashed up their car. Jill was pressured by her mother, who thought
she needed to socialize more. Wallis was the only one who actually wanted to be
in the book club. No one knew why.We were all going to be in AP English in eleventh grade. But we weren’t friends. We were not a sisterhood, and we didn’t share any pants. We were literary prisoners, sweating and reading classics and hanging out at the pool. But, of course, that’s not the whole story.
If you want to find out how book clubs can kill people, read on. Here it is.
What the Back Cover
doesn’t tell you:
This
is not a murder mystery, just so you know.
What’s good?
It’s
a good premise with great potential. I love how each chapter begins with a
literary term and that chapter demonstrates that term without disrupting the
flow of the story. The setting is pleasantly quaint, the characters are
interesting, and four girls being brought together by an AP book club is a
fresh and original story. I enjoyed the brief book discussions and how Adrienne
carried what she learned from the books over to her own life.Best part: The beginning.
What’s not so good?
Ugh!
The story felt so promising at the beginning, but, for me, it quickly crumbled
into a pointless mess. The characters were intolerable. The moms are cookie
cutter, Adrienne is bland, Jill is whiny and rude, CeeCee is flippant and
selfish and pushy; and Wallis – the only truly interesting character of them
all – is an awkward wallflower that is never truly developed. I could possibly have
overlooked the horrible characters if the story was better, but the end seemed
absolutely pointless! There was no resolution to the few interesting things
that happened…<<spoiler alert>>…Who’s Adrienne’s father? How did
Wallis get the scar? What was Adrienne’s mom’s big mistake? Why Utah and not
Connecticut?...<<spoiler over>> I feel like I missed a chapter that
explained all this. Or was I suppose to deduce something and figure out the
answers? Worst part: The drowning victim.
Recommendations þþooo
This
should have been called The Boring Book Club for Unlikeable Girls. The book
club discussions amount to almost nothing and the characters are not people I
would want to be friends with. This is nothing but summer beach fluff. Read at
your own risk.Schumacher, Julie. The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls. New York: Ember, 2012.
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