The Obituary Writer: A Novel

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.