Much Ado About Anne (The Mother-Daughter Book Club Series #2) Book

Now I am actually quite enjoying Heather Vogel Frederick's Much Ado About Anne, and really, if truth be told, rather more so than the first instalment of the series, than The Mother-Daughter Book Club (and of course, that L. M. Montgmery's Anne of Green Gables series is being read and discussed in the sequel is and remains for me the sweet and delicious icing on the proverbial cake for me). And indeed, the issues faced and encountered by Emma, Jess, Megan and Cassidy in Much Ado About Anne are generally realistically enough conceptualised, and the characters (or at least most of them) appear for the most part a bit more fleshed out and developed in Much Ado About Anne, with both their laudable traits and their sets of faults and peccadilloes clearly presented (and even with regard to Mrs Chadwick and Becca, although they both can still be grating with a problematic tendency to grandioseness, bullying and the resulting nastinesses that bullying creates and engenders).

However and rather sadly unfortunately, Mrs Wong does still and once again seem to be somewhat the sad exception here, as she appears more and more annoyingly one dimensionally outrageous, more and more typecast as a rather overly zealous (and really not ever all that funny) caricature of a vegan activist. And while yes, I do realise that there are individuals such as Lily Wong, why since Heather Vogel Frederick seems to be striving to make the other characters more nuanced and developed, does she seemingly refuse to consider this with and for the former? But this quite notwithstanding, I definitely do nevertheless massively and appreciatively adore that one scene right before Megan's benefit fashion show, where her mother, where Mrs Wong tells her daughter (who is having a bit of a crisis of confidence) how proud she is of her, and that she has more talent and fashion sense in her little finger than most people twice her age (and that sweet and poignant praise and show of confidence could have come straight from the pen of L. M. Montgomery herself, and might even have been a bit of a deliberate homaging imitation on the part of the author).

And finally, I do continue to be not all that enamored of the four different points of view that Heather Vogel Frederick makes use of in her The Mother-Daugher Book Club series (which keep switching from chapter to chapter), as especially Jess and Emma still do not seem to possess entirely distinct and personal voices. For while they might indeed be becoming a bit more individualistic and one of a kind, I for one continue to have trouble distinguishing them, and keep having to flip back to the beginning of chapters to remind myself who is "talking" (whose narrative voice is being featured). Not a huge issue, but it does become a bit of an annoying obstacle if trying to read Much Ado About Anne on the Kindle or an Ipad, as flipping back and forth is rather a tedious endeavour with e-books. Three stars as a general ranking for Much Ado About Anne (but upon rereading, I have indeed decided to lower this novel to but two stars, as the type-casting of Lilly Wong and that it is still much too often quite difficult to figure out which "daughter" is narrating really does take quite a bit away from my potential reading pleasure, even if the Anne of Green Gables series is being read, analysed and discussed by the club).