The title of this book made me want to break out in song:
“Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes,
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things.”
Sadly, this book was not one of my favorite things.
I went based on the title and short description and downloaded it from Amazon onto my Kindle. I was looking for mindless reading while we were on our anniversary cruise aboard the Norwegian Sun. This book follows the life of several young ladies in their mid-twenties as they navigate the waters of new jobs that are leading to careers, friends who are marrying and procreating and moving past college life into the next chapter.
All of the these woman appear to be stuck in their quarter-life crisis. A quarter-life crisis is just like a mid-life crisis but for the younger-folk. Some, especially those of us who go to college, face this phenomena. We are jumping from one life into the next, working, transforming ourselves into adults, moving out, analyzing relationships and sometimes, that just overwhelms us to the point of throwing up our hands and saying “WHAT AM I DO?” Most of us find ourselves flapping around for a while, maybe getting a little therapy over coffee with friends who are or have been through it, or over the coffee table of a professional who can understand it.
The characters of this books are experiencing exactly that. They stay with crappy boyfriends for stability. They stay at crappy jobs for stability. They drink….apparently for stability. And things look bleak. They feel like they aren’t making the right choices and that life is just one big, long mess, so to console themselves, they drink.
There is a lot of drinking, whining and groveling in this book, which is why I didn’t like it. I also got annoyed with the writing from time to time. The seconds were short and while they were trying to add to the story, all the jumping around made it feel a bit like a high school play with far too many acts. I couldn’t understand the flow of them.
Maybe I’m just expecting too much out of these writers today. There are good book writers, like Sophie Kinsella, Jen Lancaster and Emily Giffin, and then there are others who are trying to be like them, but are just not cutting it. I guess that’s what I feel about “Girls in White Dresses.” It comes really close to those books that I like to read, but it just doesn’t hit the mark.
I was not paid or compensated in any way for my review of this book. The thoughts and feelings expressed here are strictly my own.
