Reviews with content warning for Infidelity - Big Summer

SYNOPSIS - Daphne Berg is a plus-size Instagrammer. She’s not much of an influencer, but she does OK. In high school she used to be “friends” with Drue Cavanaugh, the school’s Queen Bee. You know the kind – gorgeous, thin, rich, and very, very mean. Six years after the fight that ended their friendship, Drue comes back into Daphne’s life, to ask her to be a bridesmaid at her Cape Cod wedding. Daphne says yes.

Big Summer starts out as a women’s fiction book about social media, toxic friendships, and body image issues. Then at page 171 the author dropped a plot twist that came out of left field and basically changed the genre of the book. What happens next is implausible, and totally ridiculous. And I enjoyed every minute of it. I gasped. I laughed out loud. I cheered for Daphne. What I did not do, was take this book seriously. But you know, in a world full of kale salads, every once in a while, we need to enjoy dessert, guilt free. In fact, Daphne would insist you do.

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Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

1.0

This book was so weird and overly-long and meandering and for what? To make a grand statement about how everyone, even a mean rich girl, has struggles and to constantly point out that people’s online personas aren’t 100% authentic because they’re inherently curated? I mean, great messages, but at the same time…no shit? They’re just such basic themes and the writing and the story do nothing to enhance them. The writing throughout was very flat. The most that I enjoyed it was with all of the sensory details that filled the prologue, but those don’t last. The characters are all such archetypes, which maybe could have been used to interesting effect, but in Big Summer that never goes anywhere. The characterizations start out flat and they end up flat, and they’re not even consistent in their details throughout. The thing that kept me going, even as I wasn’t enjoying the book, was that I kept hoping it would end up doing something interesting. There were so many routes the story could have taken that would’ve been at least entertaining, but it’s like Weiner picked the most boring one at every turn.

Also, this doesn’t matter, but there’s a million female characters (major and minor) whose names start with either a D or an A and it’s seemingly for no reason? But names just kept popping up with those initials and it was starting to make me feel paranoid.

Oh, and also also, there is some backstory in this book that is pretty plainly just a barely rehashed version of an actual true crime story and I just can’t stop thinking about how lazy that is.
Edit: I looked it up and the woman whose murder was used in this book was named Christa Worthington. I'm sorry but it makes me feel so gross that Weiner took all sorts of details from this woman's life and death without even a mention of her source of inspiration in an author's note or the acknowledgements. I mean, hell, she barely even changed the woman's name from "Christa" to "Christina." Christa Worthington and her daughter deserve better than to have their story regurgitated with barely any fictionalization in this painfully mediocre book.

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