A Little Hope

I wanted to love this book, but it wasn't as ‘for me' as I'd expected. I love character-driven novels, which is how it's been described, but I struggled to connect to any one character - just as I was starting to get really invested, we jumped to the perspective of another. And while the characters' lives were interconnected, with 12+ of them, we really could only get snapshots. It felt like we were scraping the surface - of important moments, certainly, but fleeting ones - and I craved more depth and less variety. Because of that, I enjoyed the second half - once we'd finally met the entire cast of characters - far more than the first.

I think this is intentional on Joella's part - the jacket copy says, “A Little Hope celebrates the importance of small moments of connection” - so maybe this is a case of expectations setting me up for disappointment! With that goal in mind, though, I wonder if I would have preferred this as a series of interconnected short stories/vignettes rather than a novel.

I found the writing itself to be generally solid, with a few moments of clunkiness that jarred me out of the story. I did like the ending.