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A review by elenajohansen
Sophie by Abigail Barnette
3.0
A happy and mostly triumphant ending to a series that I (and many others) feel has stumbled a bit along the way. We can't seem to agree on what those stumbles are, specifically, because so much has happened over the course of several in-universe years and seven other books. And the major problem that causes is that this sometimes didn't feel like a story, it felt like a to-do list of getting closure for the many, many plot threads.
Which, yes, is what endings are for. But in covering everything that's ever happened in the story, that drags up a lot of the things that feel like dead weight. I wasn't a fan of the idea to give Sophie a baby she didn't birth by killing off its parents in a car accident; I felt it undermined Sophie's determination not to be a mother. So now, in every book since, she's had to do a mental dance of "I'm a caregiver, not a mother" even when she's clearly performing parental duties and experiencing something at least adjacent to a maternal sort of love. And this book addresses that, actually in more depth (or at least more consistently) than I recall other books doing, by exploring her dynamic with El-Mudad's children, who were long out of babyhood when they came into Sophie's life. So I won't say that cognitive dissonance isn't recognized and discussed, only that I wish it had never had to happen in the first place.
But the list goes on. Some readers apparently dislike El-Mudad (not me, I adore him.) So they're going to be unhappy he's even around, let alone getting a happy ending with Neil and Sophie. Holli and Deja and Penny all have to show up--and man, even though I'd read the first two of Penny's spin-off novels back when they came out, I'd managed to forget she was a character at all, it's been so long. It's been long enough that I'd also forgotten, when Sophie runs into Ian at a party, that she slept with him and his ex-wife back in their collective swinging days. As for me, I didn't really like The Sister that much (relatively speaking to the other novels) so I was forced to sit through Molly half-heartedly being important to the plot again, and the only-sort-of-resolved issue of Sophie in denial about her diabetes. I don't particularly feel like either plot thread enriches the story, and even the tiny subplot with Molly and Amal, cute in isolation, felt like a complication that we didn't really need on top of everything else we already have to speed-run through.
If there can be said to be a "main" plot of this novel on its own, it's certainly the Laurence/Valerie/Olivia family tangle, and that, I do feel was handled well. The issues were foreshadowed, the complications laid out and entangled with subplots in great detail, and the resolution satisfying. Given that Valerie has been a thorn in our main characters' collective side for the entire run of the series, I would have been disappointed if she didn't still have a major role to play at the end, and as far as that goes, I got what I wanted.
I just also had to wade through a lot of flotsam that I wish could have been left behind.
Which, yes, is what endings are for. But in covering everything that's ever happened in the story, that drags up a lot of the things that feel like dead weight. I wasn't a fan of the idea to give Sophie a baby she didn't birth by killing off its parents in a car accident; I felt it undermined Sophie's determination not to be a mother. So now, in every book since, she's had to do a mental dance of "I'm a caregiver, not a mother" even when she's clearly performing parental duties and experiencing something at least adjacent to a maternal sort of love. And this book addresses that, actually in more depth (or at least more consistently) than I recall other books doing, by exploring her dynamic with El-Mudad's children, who were long out of babyhood when they came into Sophie's life. So I won't say that cognitive dissonance isn't recognized and discussed, only that I wish it had never had to happen in the first place.
But the list goes on. Some readers apparently dislike El-Mudad (not me, I adore him.) So they're going to be unhappy he's even around, let alone getting a happy ending with Neil and Sophie. Holli and Deja and Penny all have to show up--and man, even though I'd read the first two of Penny's spin-off novels back when they came out, I'd managed to forget she was a character at all, it's been so long. It's been long enough that I'd also forgotten, when Sophie runs into Ian at a party, that she slept with him and his ex-wife back in their collective swinging days. As for me, I didn't really like The Sister that much (relatively speaking to the other novels) so I was forced to sit through Molly half-heartedly being important to the plot again, and the only-sort-of-resolved issue of Sophie in denial about her diabetes. I don't particularly feel like either plot thread enriches the story, and even the tiny subplot with Molly and Amal, cute in isolation, felt like a complication that we didn't really need on top of everything else we already have to speed-run through.
If there can be said to be a "main" plot of this novel on its own, it's certainly the Laurence/Valerie/Olivia family tangle, and that, I do feel was handled well. The issues were foreshadowed, the complications laid out and entangled with subplots in great detail, and the resolution satisfying. Given that Valerie has been a thorn in our main characters' collective side for the entire run of the series, I would have been disappointed if she didn't still have a major role to play at the end, and as far as that goes, I got what I wanted.
I just also had to wade through a lot of flotsam that I wish could have been left behind.