Review: The Generosity of Women, by Courtney Eldridge

Reading The Generosity of Women was like trying to keep track of a whirlwind. The novel's main concept is to follow a chain of events through the prospect of six different women, who are all connected by one main strand that the reader doesn't get clued in on until the last quarter of the book.

What is at first problematic - following the six women through rapid-fire chapter / voice changes - becomes surprisingly monotonous towards the end of the story. I actually started wondering if I had accidentally opened the book in the wrong section, because several of the perspectives were very similar, and with such similar voices it became difficult to tell them apart. To make things even more difficult, a few of the characters had similar names, and several of them knew each other. I quite nearly had to make a chart to keep track of everyone and their relationships to the other characters. Because there were so many characters, it was difficult to connect to any of them, because there wasn't time to get deeply into any of them. The one I enjoyed the most was also the youngest, Jordan, but her perspective was a little thin.

While it took me a few chapters to get into the story, after awhile I found that I was enjoying most parts of it. However, by the final quarter, I was skimming some sections, because hearing the same story over and over and over was getting a little old, and the final chapters were entirely predictable. I was fairly disgusted with several of the characters by the time I was done, as they became more and more caricatures of themselves.

The book isn't poorly written, per se, in that I could see what Eldridge was trying to do, and it might have worked if she hadn't taken it to the nth degree. I haven't read anything else by her, so I have nothing to compare it to, but if she had chosen only three or four characters, and developed them more, it might have been a higher-quality read. As it is, it was a mostly-enjoyable piece of chick lit, nothing more.

Rating: two out of five stars. Confusing beginning, interesting middle, boring ending.