Okay, lately all my favourite authors have been slow to release their books so I've been looking around a bit, and discovered this.

There were a lot of characters, and each character had its own mini story and own problems. The characters were all really well sketched out, but I felt like every single one of them whined and whined about how they'd been hard done by in their relationships with each other. I mean I'm sure everyone feels like that occasionally but seriously, they did not appreciate each other or look at the positives. If it had just been one character to do this, would have been okay, but they all did it, continuously. When they weren't it was about how sad they were due to sacrifices, mistakes blahdiblahblahblahblah.

Strangely I don't think there was any major conflict to fixate on, it was more the interweaving of characters and their interactions with one another. I never really identified with any of the characters because (a) it was continuously switching narrators and (b) they all seemed to whine all the time. Then it would jump ahead in time and pick up a few weeks/months/years later, I had no idea where this story was going, what the problem was and generally what was going on. It was weird, I felt like the author made up the characters all with a sort of joined past and then went off on a tangent...

but thats just me.

Another thing that annoyed me was the setting 1952, was this necessary? I like historical settings, but since I was born a few decades afterwards I'd like to see some historical detail to enlighten me... the poor 80's babe. She didn't really show the setting and I feel I might have missed things just due to lack of social context.

Yet in all fairness I loved how it showed and demonstrated really clearly that there are always about 6 sides to a story, that "right" and "wrong" are blurred lines, defined by our own mind. There was a nice insight Justine gave at the very end (... also mention her character transformation was unrealistic...) about Justine and her choices with men which I thought pretty much saved the book.

Read it if you want to see how people react to their pasts, deal with problems etc. Looking for a great story, its not here.

I actually really enjoyed this book in the beginning, maybe first 200 pgs. But then it began to drag. It had a nice story that I thought was going somewhere, but instead it keeps going in circles. I was at the part where Jory and Woo finally got together and had a wonderful evening, then they were in an argument before you know it. At that point is where I became turned off. I ended up giving it up with less than 100 pages left. I could really care less to see what happens to these people. I did like Ross' character though.

I thought this book ranked up there with some of the best I've read. I thought the two main women in this book were terrific. They each had their unique set of hardships and it was great the way they helped each other out to triumph over their hardships and make a new life for themselves. I cried at the end for Justine(Ethel). Be sure and read this if you have a chance--you will really enjoy it.

The first of the book was good. However, it switched too many times to different relationships and I had a hard time buying into any of them. I was disappointed with the end of the book as well. It was not realistic at all!

Michaels spent 2/3rds of the book endearing you to 4 different characters and then she drops them like hot potatoes and expects you to understand why you are supposed to dislike them at the end. I found myself disliking the main character. It was like trying to follow a ten year old's discription of a movie. I have not been so disappointed by a book in a long time.