TITLE: Girls in White Dresses AUTHOR: Jennifer Close
STARTED: October 23, 2011
FINISHED: October 26, 2011
PAGES: 304
GENRE: Fiction
FIRST SENTENCE: Isabella's sister, Molly, was married with ten bridesmaids in matching tea-length, blue floral Laura Ashley dresses.
SUMMARY: [From Amazon
] Girls in White Dresses tells the story of three women grappling
with heartbreak and career change, family pressure and new love—all
while suffering through an endless round of weddings and bridal showers.Isabella, Mary, and Lauren feel like everyone they know is getting married. On Sunday after Sunday, at bridal shower after bridal shower, they coo over toasters, collect ribbons and wrapping paper, eat minuscule sandwiches and doll-sized cakes. They wear pastel dresses and drink champagne by the case, but amid the celebration these women have their own lives to contend with: Isabella is working at a mailing-list company, dizzy with the mixed signals of a boss who claims she’s on a diet but has Isabella file all morning if she forgets to bring her a chocolate muffin. Mary thinks she might cry with happiness when she finally meets a nice guy who loves his mother, only to realize he’ll never love Mary quite as much. And Lauren, a waitress at a Midtown bar, swears up and down she won’t fall for the sleazy bartender—a promise that his dirty blond curls and perfect vodka sodas make hard to keep.
With a wry sense of humor, Jennifer Close brings us through those thrilling, bewildering, what-on-earth-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life years of early adulthood. These are the years when everyone else seems to have a plan, a great job, and an appropriate boyfriend, while Isabella has a blind date with a gay man, Mary has a crush on her boss, and Lauren has a goldfish named Willard. Through boozy family holidays and disastrous ski vacations, relationships lost to politics and relationships found in pet stores, Girls in White Dresses pulls us deep inside the circle of these friends, perfectly capturing the wild frustrations and soaring joys of modern life.
THOUGHTS: I put this book in my library queque because it received a lot of pre-release hype. I was disppointed. I never connected with the book's characters or story. I am, for the most part, living the life of these characters, and I still couldn't identify or care about them.
The writing is far to episodic, and that makes the story feel incomplete. I felt myself constantly asking, "And?" The writing felt lazy and unedited. The stories of the characters are told in vignettes, but there was no connection or transition. There were just stories about the happenings in these characters lives. Normally, I can get behind vignette writing, but not this time. The stories felt too much like a high schooler attempting to write their first novel.
I could have overlooked the writing if the story was good. Instead, it just felt "there." Nothing special, nothing intriguing, simply there. More often than not, I wondered why the characters were acting they way they were. The motivations for these characters actions and responses seemed to be lacking. Close does make some decent observations about what it means to be a young woman finding her way, but her characters don't live up to these insights.
I did not give this book a lower rating because I at least didn't hate it. I just didn't care. Maybe that's actually worse, but I have to truly dislike a book to give an epically bad score. This book, I just cast aside when I was done and said, "Next."
RATING: 4/10 [An "okay" book]
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