Columnist Bells Walker finds herself pregnant (again!) and packs up herself and her two teenage children to follow her husband from New York City to (in her mind) the middle of nowhere, which is the only place he’s able to get a job. She takes an instant dislike to their new house, the town, and the people living there and starts a blog at her old newspaper in NYC, where she anonymously insults everything and everyone in her new community. Of course, this blog grows legs and everyone wants to know who the author is who would dare write what she’s been writing, and the stress on her to continue to hide intensifies.
The underlying premise was fine – you need a higher-stakes impetus to create a reason to have a good story – but the adult main characters were just so unlikeable, and I found myself frustrated with all of them through most of the book. Why did Bells passively go along with everything that happened at the beginning of the story? Her husband tells her to quit her job? She quits her job. Her mother-in-law says that she has to do everything possible to further her husband’s career over anything else in her life? She acquiesces. Even having none of the toilets operational at her new home pushes her to actually do anything.
I also could not figure out why this fully grown, very well-educated woman was such an outsider in her own life and never took any responsibility for anything that happened. At the same time, why did she stay with her husband? She acted so honored and humbled that a younger man would grace her with his presence and even marry a woman so much older than him, but he was awful, and I never stopped feeling that everyone would have been better off without him in the picture.
It’s not hard to believe that someone living a life like that would lash out at strangers around her, just to get it out of her system somewhere so she didn’t murder her husband in his sleep. And I definitely felt sorry for Bells, but at the same time, there was no reason she couldn’t do something substantive to solve her problems instead of being passive aggressive.
Thank you to Lake Union Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. It has not influenced my opinion.