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Community comment are the opinions of contributing users. These comment do not represent the opinions of Daniel Boone Regional Library.
Apr 25, 2018elsalia rated this title 0.5 out of 5 stars
I don't normally write reviews, but I feel the need to bring this up to any potential readers. "Anna Oh, a middle-age wife, mother and artist, divorces her husband after 27 years of marriage to marry Vivica, the Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her professional success." Okay, technically this is true, but that's not really what the book is about... at all. With that description, I expected the book to be a love story between Anna and Vivica. The back of the book's description is a little more telling, warning that it will involve the "toxic secrets" of the Oh family, which could mean about a million different things... and in this book, it probably means every single "toxic secret" you could possibly imagine. I stopped reading after an entire chapter dedicated to graphic description of child sexual abuse. The characters do horrible things, like physically and emotionally abuse their children, or a therapist sexually taking advantage of their client, suffer no real repercussions beyond a scolding (if even), and feel sorry for themselves for receiving even that. Maybe my perspective on it would be different if I were given a summary more like "Wally Lamb explores some of the darkest sides of humanity and how 'monsters' are created" instead of leading me to believe that it was going to actually be about a lesbian romance. We get entire chapters dedicated to the formation of Annie's relationship with her ex-husband, but even as I left off in the last third or so of the book, I have very little idea about Annie's relationship with Vivica, who has appeared for about 3 sentences.