George Street, Our Street: A Poor Family's Richest Years in Chicago Book

I enjoyed this book enough to finish it -- but only just.

The story is just fine, and the kind of book I often enjoy to read -- family dynamics, inner secrets not revealed, long-lost loves. But everything is just so loudly telegraphed, and so painfully spelled out -- as though the author doesn't think we'll be able to read the words that well at all, much less between the lines.

(It doesn't help that so much of the prose is incredibly overwritten. The very first sentence tells you where this is headed: "My last glimpse of him was as forbidden as all that had gone before, but no less precious... I smelled [the coastal air] with an acuity that was to become an indelible splash on my memory's canvas." Couldn't we be eased into the melodrama just a tad more gently?)

The characters have a little bit of interest, but basically they are very one-dimensional "types" who each has a specific and predetermined role to play. Caroline is the slightly bitter, childless career woman who can't commit herself to love because she never thought her mother loved her enough. Annette is the overshadowed younger sister who thinks her mother didn't love her enough, and becomes a smothering helicopter mom to compensate. Leah is the flighty social butterfly who can't settle anywhere because her mother didn't love her enough. They are all jealous of each other -- so jealous that they haven't spoken to each other in years. Of course the mother, Ginny, is equally one-dimensional as seen through her daughters' eyes -- cold, withdrawn, and she doesn't even show up for the grand family reunion that she's organized.

Pretty much every actual event and interaction in the book is so deeply foreshadowed and hinted at that you know exactly what's going to happen next.

Of course, there is more to the mother than meets the eye, and in the end, her staged reunion and her story, gradually revealed, change everything in her daughters' lives. (I have to admit that the story that's revealed is almost what I was expecting, but not quite, and there is actually a bit of depth in her character during that part of the story. Too bad there wasn't depth in all of the characters throughout the story...)

It's all very neat, tidy, and Harlequin romance-y. I guess if you really like Harlequin romances and want your realistic fiction in a nice, tidy, not very realistic package, you would really enjoy it. Like I said, I enjoyed it enough to finish it. I should probably have read it on the beach -- I might have given it three stars if it was sunny and I was reading it in a hammock with a couple of mai tais lined up.