Hello Beautiful

This book is thoroughly mediocre and merits about 2.5 stars. Around the 150-page mark, I also thought of DNFing it because there is so much telling and not nearly enough showing. This is a literary fiction about intergenerational relationships but the people in it felt so one-dimensional, bland and clichéd. like characters I would expect from YA books. We're told again and again how the Padavano sisters are so close yet all their actions show the exact opposite of that. As an elder sibling, I was particularly pissed at Julia's actions. It almost felt like Napolitano wrote one character and then split her 4 ways. The capacity for empathy for Will has only been bestowed upon Sylvie and not his wife Julia. The capacity to stand up to their mother has only been bestowed upon CeCe and not on Julia/Sylvie. All of the stakes in this are not that deep and could be overcome in about half a second if any of these people had even a passing interest in each other, let alone the kind of all-consuming sisterly love we're told they do. rounding up my rating to three because there were some moments I enjoyed and the prose wasn't half bad.