After Packer's debut novel (The Dive from Clausen's Pier, which I enormously loved and HIGHLY recommend), I was really looking forward to reading this book (her third book, second novel). What a disappointment.

The story starts with Liz and Sarabeth as adolescents. They live near each other and their relationship is like that of sisters, owing in part to Sarabeth's mother's suicide.

The novel quickly flashes forward to the pair in their adult life. Sarabeth is single and has become estranged from the married man with whom she was having an affair. Liz is now married with a teenaged daughter (Lauren) and a son several years younger than Lauren (Joe). It soon becomes painfully obvious that Lauren is depressed and she attempts to kills herself.

This tests the relationship between Liz and Sarabeth, as the jacket copy promised. But it was in really ridiculous ways. To go into it further would spoil the utterly incompetently written book, but I'll say that it was as if the author tried WAY too hard to go out of her way to be unpredictable. But then she failed by ending the book in a completely predictable way, so I'm not sure why she wasted my time with those 300 pages in the middle.

Plus, it annoyed me that this book had a Lorelei, Lauren, and Liz, and Joe and a Jim, and a handful of other alliterative names. How difficult is it to come up with OTHER names? Throw me a Ralph or a Zelda!

I really hope her third novel returns to "Clausen's Pier"-level of writing.