Kay Bigelow

Treat and Mickey are the two main characters in this book. Treat is moving to Vermont after selling her company. Mickey is in Vermont, and no one but the reader at first knows why.

They meet and I guess fall in love right there. That part seemed very like teenagers not the supposed accomplished adults they are supposed to be. I guess that's where my criticisms sorta start. I mean, I had a lot of problems with this book, but chief among them is the characters and relationships. There was also just so, so much tell and not enough show, and that too hurt both the characters as well as the narrative.

When it came to the two main characters it seemed like there was no warm up. They went from not knowing each other to soulmates in two chapters practically. And for all the other characters, I never felt like I knew them, and therefore I never really cared what happened to them. Killed off, not killed off, together, not together, it had no emotional impact on me as I was reading the book.

Also, sometimes the narrative seemed to jump around. I really felt like I was either reading an outline, or seriously missing some parts of the conversation or a description. And then I'm not sure why the climax of the story happened so centrally in the novel and was over so relatively quickly, and then there was all this stuff after it. Usually that's the denouement, and this denouement seemed so, so, so long.

Oh, and why in the world is a composting business funny? It seems like a great idea (especially in the Vermont/New England area. I've lived in this area my whole life, had a family compost pile every year of that, my grandmother and great-grandmothers did too. It's how you get rich soil for your garden, and how you can go from having a crap-load of trash each week to one barrel at most. And, these days there are so many people who either don't want to do it themselves, or live in the city/apartments/etc. and can't do it for themselves, companies like Roots Compost are literally saving the planet, making our soil better, and making themselves some money hopefully too).

I think this is the author's first book, and so, I would probably try another book by the author, but I definitely didn't like this particular novel.

I was given this ARC by Netgalley on behalf of Bold Strokes Books.… (mehr)