I enjoyed this quite a lot, but I really think it should have been marketed as a book of short stories. Instead it's a book of short stories that is called a novel, yet has none of the cohesion or overarching plot required of a novel, though the stories are all about the same four women. It's also very obvious that many of these stories were originally published separately, as there's a lot of repeated background info, introducing characters as if we've never met them before when it's the fifth time they've appeared, etc. There are also a handful of stories in first person, when the majority are third person, and that kind of makes it feel patched together, too. (There was also one very bizarre story where it was first person, except all the girls were named in third person. So even though the narrator was saying I and we and us in reference to the four sisters, it sounded like there was a mysterious fifth sister doing the narration because she attributed actions and dialogue to all four in third person. I...have never seen a story written like that before and hope never to do so again. It was disconcerting and a very strange choice.)[return][return]Anyway, I really did enjoy the individual stories quite a lot, and found the book hard to put down. I just am kind of annoyed with it for saying it's a novel when it's not, as that made me keep expecting things that it never delivered.