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slow-paced
I loved In A Jam, and this book takes place in Friendship, RI, site of that book. A few carry-over characters appear, but this book is nothing like the other one. It centers around Sunny, who is now running a vegan cafe, and her brother's best friend, Beckett, who owns the oyster company/restaurant on the other side of the parking lot. There are a lot of tropes in this book, almost 500 pages and about 100 of those pages are just padding, dragging out the story.
I love me a good story with lots of banter, but here, it's just sharp and sometimes vicious arguing, mainly for the sake of it. Beckett is overbearing, yes, which is only slightly leavened by his concern for Sunny's health. It would have helped his character arc if the reader could have seen some compassion for her in their youth, but he was a teenage arsehole, so his distress over her epilepsy today seems more a result of the stress he's currently undergoing from every direction. Sunny, on the other hand, is universally loved, though I'm not really sure why. Besides arguing with Beckett at every chance, she also takes advantage of his money with very little thanks to him.
There is way too much drama in the story. It's like a TV series that has a different crisis each week that has no impact on the final episode.
I almost DNF'd at the town meeting because someone in another town served a bunch of drunks, and it caused a big fight. Not one New England town would call a town meeting the same day to implement a curfew on town businesses without proper notification and discussion. Beckett seems able to bring in big machinery and renovate whatever he wants on coastal land without any kind of planning board oversight. These are just a couple of examples where the author tried to create a crisis to be resolved, and they made no sense. Eliminating these types of issues could have made the book a reasonable side and improved pacing.
I loved the side characters in In A Jam, but we have a bunch of tokens that seemed to be thrown into the story for no particular reason. I love diverse representation, but when an author identifies every character as "white man," "black polyandrous woman," or "old white bisexual" (I didn't go back to look these up; these are examples) well, that's tokenism.
Anyway, enough of a rant. This book wasn't for me which makes me sad as I was looking forward to it. I give it 2 1/2 stars.
I love me a good story with lots of banter, but here, it's just sharp and sometimes vicious arguing, mainly for the sake of it. Beckett is overbearing, yes, which is only slightly leavened by his concern for Sunny's health. It would have helped his character arc if the reader could have seen some compassion for her in their youth, but he was a teenage arsehole, so his distress over her epilepsy today seems more a result of the stress he's currently undergoing from every direction. Sunny, on the other hand, is universally loved, though I'm not really sure why. Besides arguing with Beckett at every chance, she also takes advantage of his money with very little thanks to him.
There is way too much drama in the story. It's like a TV series that has a different crisis each week that has no impact on the final episode.
I almost DNF'd at the town meeting because someone in another town served a bunch of drunks, and it caused a big fight. Not one New England town would call a town meeting the same day to implement a curfew on town businesses without proper notification and discussion. Beckett seems able to bring in big machinery and renovate whatever he wants on coastal land without any kind of planning board oversight. These are just a couple of examples where the author tried to create a crisis to be resolved, and they made no sense. Eliminating these types of issues could have made the book a reasonable side and improved pacing.
I loved the side characters in In A Jam, but we have a bunch of tokens that seemed to be thrown into the story for no particular reason. I love diverse representation, but when an author identifies every character as "white man," "black polyandrous woman," or "old white bisexual" (I didn't go back to look these up; these are examples) well, that's tokenism.
Anyway, enough of a rant. This book wasn't for me which makes me sad as I was looking forward to it. I give it 2 1/2 stars.