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A review by itchyfingers
Best of Friends by Cathy Kelly
2.0
Four very different women--Abby, a television actress; her painfully shy teenage daughter, Jess; Lizzie, reeling from her ex-husband's new romance; and Erin, returning to Ireland from Chicago to help her husband's career--are brought together in the town of Dunmore, Ireland, by various circumstances as they get the chance to transform their lives for the better.
It's a story of pretty ordinary lives, mingled with the odd bit of panache, though I thought that the ending was very predictable and could have been tackled in a better way. The writing style is clear though over padded, and that's where the book fails, although I did get involved in the lives of the ladies over a two week period. It's not a hard read, but it is a long one, and the atmosphere of the little village in which it was placed didn't really come out very well at all.
The strongest character of all in the book was Sally, the link between the three women who played more major parts in the story, and I was actually saddened when Sally died, not because she had died so young or left children behind her, but because she was the most interesting of the characters created, and left the rest of the book bland, and missing that vital ingredient that makes fiction work.
I have to admit now that having read the first couple of chapters, I felt I had made a huge mistake, though perhaps was not being fair to the author. Instead of finding it tempting to read, I found it hard work, and thought that the author had included too many characters to make it readable, though giving the author a bit more of my time, and wanting to get my moneys worth out of the book, I persevered.
It's a story of pretty ordinary lives, mingled with the odd bit of panache, though I thought that the ending was very predictable and could have been tackled in a better way. The writing style is clear though over padded, and that's where the book fails, although I did get involved in the lives of the ladies over a two week period. It's not a hard read, but it is a long one, and the atmosphere of the little village in which it was placed didn't really come out very well at all.
The strongest character of all in the book was Sally, the link between the three women who played more major parts in the story, and I was actually saddened when Sally died, not because she had died so young or left children behind her, but because she was the most interesting of the characters created, and left the rest of the book bland, and missing that vital ingredient that makes fiction work.
I have to admit now that having read the first couple of chapters, I felt I had made a huge mistake, though perhaps was not being fair to the author. Instead of finding it tempting to read, I found it hard work, and thought that the author had included too many characters to make it readable, though giving the author a bit more of my time, and wanting to get my moneys worth out of the book, I persevered.