Maine--by J. Courtney Sullivan

I've been consciously force-feeding on many novels by female authors just to go against my inclination. I don't go gender screening my authors, I usually go with the premise and whether the central character is far from my sphere of experience. Whenever I had to break a tie, I went with the female author just to be in a different landscape. This was one such attempt.

With the book cover showing praise from Gloria Steinem for this author's first book, I was ready for a fiesty feminist novel. What I got instead was a three-generational tale of an Irish Catholic family from Boston and the summer cottage in Maine where the Matriarch holds court with timeshare arrangement for her offsprings. Whereas the family tree is diverse and filled with distinct characters, the bulk of the novel is narrated by the matriarch, her oldest daughter, and her grand daughter with a daughter-in-law's voice mixed in for an outsider perspective. Although the first-person narrative lends a ready-made excuse for telling rather than showing, the novel is exhaustively a telling of a story with so much backstory that it reads like a radio serial transcript.

While the most likable character is the granddaughter, she's a glutton for abuse from almost everyone in her life. The grandmother is basically a self-hating drunken wretch who's supposed to charm everyone outside the family, but we see no evidence of it. The mother has some moments of sarcastic brilliance but ultimately is as unbearable as the grandmother until the very end when she inexplicably becomes selfless. The daughter-in-law is a passive aggressive martyr, but there are no undercurrents or subtlety in her takes. She becomes stale very quick.

All the other characters in the novel left without their own narratives promise to be more alluring than the four that yammer on without letting up. Unless you're penning a biography, why would you subject the reader to irredeemable despicable off color behavior?

In the end, I felt like I spent a long weekend stuck with a toxic family that hated each other and confided in me all their unsavory thoughts and gossip. Can't wait to read something substantive next.