Review: Dune Road

Dune Road

By Jane Green

Viking 2009

341 pages

From my shelves

Kit Hargrove is starting life over. She has divorced her distant Wall Street husband and found a beach side bungalow in Connecticut where she plans to put her life back together with her two kids. Kit finds a job through her neighbor as the assistant to the famous but reclusive writer Robert McClore. But just when Kit starts to find a rhythm, things start to fall apart. A mysterious woman shows up claiming a connection to Kit, something is wrong with a close friend, and Kit finds herself increasingly happy to see her ex in spite of the gorgeous man she has started dating. Dune Road is a look at the things that can break our relationships and the bonds that last through the hardest moments of life.

I started reading this book expecting something light but interesting. Ultimately, this one fell really flat for me. There were several moments where I wondered if this book had ever seen an editor before publication. The ways in which the characters spoke were so inconsistent - sometimes stilted and formal, but other times sounding like teenagers. What middle aged, divorced woman thinks "A date! A date! I have a date! And he's cute! Soooo cute! My ship may be coming in after all!"?

I also felt like Ms. Green began with a lot of really interesting ideas and then proceeded to give each and every one of her characters a really easy way out. Kit was a woman starting life over, but at the end of the book her life looks an awful lot like it did before the events of this book. Her friend Tracey has a secret past and the stakes could be so high for her character (and eventually for them all), but instead we get a tidy resolution without any real danger. Instead of creating an interesting relationship with the mysterious connection who shows up from Kit's past, she is exactly what they fear from the beginning.

This is not a terrible book. It's entertaining and it's a fast read. I was just disappointed because I could easily see the ways in which this book could be more. I have read some of her books before and as I started reading this one, I wondered if this was one of her first novels.  But Dune Road was published only a few years ago. While this would be an ok choice for a quick read, it's not Jane Green's best book. 

Review: Another Piece of My Heart

Another Piece of My Heart

By Jane Green

St. Martin's Press March 2012

400 pages

ARC won from Macmillan and Goodreads

Andi has become a well-known fairy tale character: the evil stepmother. But Andi isn’t evil; she is well-loved by her husband Ethan and her stepdaughter Sophia. The only person who finds her evil is her teenage stepdaughter Emily. Their tempestuous relationship threatens to drive Andi to the edge and tear the family apart. When Andi discovers that Emily has a big secret, will it save the fragile family or finally destroy them?

This novel got off to a bit of a rough start for me. It seemed so endlessly clichéd – the rebellious teenage daughter, the father who makes excuses for her, and worst of all the ridiculous gay neighbors. Ms. Green quickly establishes the impasse at which Andi and Emily exist. Emily is rude and nasty to her stepmother for no apparent reason, and Ethan tends to side with his precious daughter which of course strains his marriage. The situation is not helped by Ethan’s ex who has partial custody of the girls and is happy to stick her nose into their relationship and disparage Andi. The problem for me was that we lingered in this no man’s land for a little too long. Like Andi, I was seriously considering leaving this relationship. .

Thankfully, the novel does move beyond this. The revelation of Emily’s secret has major ramifications for the family and it has the potential to heal or break them. It made a lot of difference for me when the narrative switched from Andi to Emily. Once we saw things from both points of view, it made it much more accessible for the reader.

While I was tempted early on to write this book off as fluffy, as it progressed it wrestled with a lot of important issues. The stakes become increasingly high and I sat down and finished the book in an afternoon. This book is ultimately about what makes a family – who do you let in and who do you let go? Is family defined by blood or by something deeper? While the story is somewhat predictable, I did find myself thinking about the characters and the issues with which they grapple after I finished reading.

If Jane Green is your girl and you have been waiting to get your hands on this book, fear not! Another Piece of My Heart is released today, March 13! Pick it up at your book-selling establishment of choice.