Reviews - You Only Call When You're in Trouble

202 reviews for:

You Only Call When You're in Trouble

I read this book for a book club. Outside that I probably wouldn't have read it and I would have been fine with that.
It was...fine?
I can see the charm in the slice of life aspect and the premature ending when characters were just beginning to shed the traits that made them grading throughout most of the story.
At the end I wondered, "what was the point?" A story about an upper middle class "unorthodox family" who are all WASPy and self absorbed in their own way.
It was well written and fairly engaging, but with no actual growth or resolution at the end it ultimately felt hollow.

aetataureate's review

5.0

emotional funny tense

Diverse cast of characters: No

mariannadionysiou's review

1.0

This was one of the worst books I have read in a while. To start, the beginning moved far too slow and there were too many perspective shifts. In the end, characters felt two-dimensional and their stories became half finished. The book has an over reliance on cliches, too — affairs, absent yet eccentric mother, student ‘coming’ on to a professor — I found the student/teacher narrative particularly troubling, especially their need to describe the student as “small” and “high school like” over and over. Lastly, there were too many unnecessary physical descriptions and asides that, in the end, slowed the book down even more.