review; the unbearable book club for unsinkable girls

I’ve been writing reviews for books for a couple of years now, and posting them on my booklr. But until I can hit a stride here on this blog, I figure it’d be smarter to slowly migrate the reviews from there to here. I mean, it’s going to take a while for me to get into a groove, I know this. At least I have some things already reviewed and posted that I can now put up here as well.

This is probably the only review that will have a preface to it, if only to explain that my reviews tend to be written within a few days of having read the book in question, and posted shortly after. I won’t be dating the pre-posted reviews except maybe in tags, just in case I post a new review before I’ve completely covered all the older ones.

Note: These reviews have been unedited from their original form.

The Unbearable Book Club For Unsinkable Girls
by Julie Schumacher

‘I’m Adrienne Haus, survivor of a mother-daughter book club. Most of us didn’t want to join. My mother signed me up because I was stuck at home all summer, with my knee in a brace. CeeCee’s parents forced her to join after cancelling her Paris trip because she bashed up their car. The members of “The Unbearable Book Club,” CeeCee, Jill, Wallis, and I, were all going into eleventh grade A.P. English. But we weren’t friends. We were literary prisoners, sweating, reading classics, and hanging out at the pool. If you want to find out how membership in a book club can end up with a person being dead, you can probably look us up under mother-daughter literary catastrophe. Or open this book and read my essay, which I’ll turn in when I go back to school.’

Review:
I finished the book in two days because I thought it was pretty interesting. It’s not the most interesting book I’ve ever read, but it was interesting enough. The premise was entertaining, the idea behind it, but I think in the end, it fell a little flat. I’d recommend it to people who want something light to read, or people who enjoy reading, because a book about book clubs? Always fun for book enthusiasts.

Adrienne – or A, as CeeCee calls her – is a lost soul, who has no idea who she is, in part because she is the child of a single mother and has no idea who her father is. This important question, who she is and who her father is, is never answered in the book, but perhaps that’s the thing about the book. Life doesn’t always give you the answers you seek. But the fact that as a novel, we don’t get answers to this, and to the questions we have about Willis’ life and mother, has the novel falling a bit flat at the end.

It’s still a compelling enough read to pass the time with.

[note: this book reignited my spark for reading and made me want to start a book club. currently bugging a friend to start one with me, a physical one, while being a part of a whatsapp book club with that friend and another.]