The Obituary Writer: A Novel

Ann Hood...Anita Shreve...Anne Tyler...We all have our favorite authors. You know you will get a good book from these authors, though you never know exactly what form the story will take. I like that.

Ann Hood's The Obituary Writer did not disappoint. Two stories converge in The Obituary Writer, one the story of a young expectant wife in a Kennedy-dazzled 1963 America, and the other the story of a Victorian age woman desperately seeking her lover after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. The stories are loosely connected and yet both can stand on their own.

If you've liked other Ann Hood novels, I feel pretty confident you will like this one, too.

I thought this would be an easy, fast, interesting reading. Unfortunately only one of those adjectives came true. No big words, no odd sentence structure - it was an easy read. Too bad I was continually able to put it down. Why? because nothing happened. Claire obsessed about Jackie Kennedy, when she wasn't fretting over what her ex-lover was doing at that exact minute. Vivien obsessed about her long dead lover actually being alive. I figured out the connection between the 2 about 30 pages or so into the story. Characters were barely 2 dimensional and the plot, what there was of one, was flimsy. Maybe if the author had delved deeper into the characters - their motivations, their struggles with grief - there might have been more to grab onto.

What really got in the way of the story was that the actual text read more like a rough draft, if that. Character names were interchanged haphazzardly, locations were off, and for the love of history, the stock market crash of 1929 happened on a Tuesday. Thus it's referred to as Black Tuesday. Not Black Friday.