At the Breakers [Hardcover]

I did enjoy a lot of it. This book was definitely worth the time to read and I found myself picking it up again very easily each time. It's not complex but I don't think it falls into the chick-lit category either. Glad I read it but I don't feel a great need to recommend it to friends.

The main character is a forty-two year old woman who has 4 children, giving birth to the first child when she was 15 years old. That event is the defining moment in the book that sets everything else into motion. Married young to the father and giving birth to a second child, the marriage predictably falls apart and she moves on to other marriages and other children continually making bad choices and struggling with the enormous task of raising four children on her own with minimal family support and trying to finish her own education. Part of me felt very sympathetic with the character and part of me kept thinking that she was making one bad decision after the next and largely causing her own continuing problems.

While an interesting and quick read, there are some very real problems with the book that keep it from being as good as it could have been.

1) the cast of characters is just too large -- even major characters seemed to be left too two-dimensional

2) there were some very unrealistic situations -- how many parents are going to really send their 14-year-old, pregnant daughter across the country with her equally young husband to live and have a baby with no financial support? They couldn't legally even sign the contract on their apartment, couldn't drive, would even have difficulty getting jobs due to child labor laws but none of this ever is addressed.

3) some events that appear to have deep meaning are never explained. There is an entire sequence where one of the daughters shows up unexpectedly for Christmas and a whole collection of Christmas gifts are retreived from Jo's (the main character) room for her including a painting. The painting mysteriously appears, is described as so significant in her life (even though we have never heard of it before), is given to the daughter who immediately grasps the emotional support being bestowed upon her throught the giving of the gift. After that the painting disappears never to be referenced again. This happens multiple times where things just show up and then the story-line is dropped.

The bottom line on this is that it's good, but not great. As the author continues to develop (and the quality of the editing improves) this author has a lot of potential to write really outstanding books -- this one just isn't quite there yet.

At the Breakers by Mary Ann Taylor-Hall appealed to me because the protagonist is a single mother, leaving a difficult relationship, seeking refuge in her new job at renovating a hotel, while finally giving herself to explore her dreams of being a writer. For all intents and purposes, I should have loved Jo Sinclair and I kept hoping I would. When in the first chapter she doesn't call the police as she should . . . nor in the second .. . or third, I was prepared to throw the book across the room.

Perhaps I should have but the truth this is not a badly written book. If you like Lifetime movies or preferred the movie version of Under the Tuscan Sun to the memoir then you'll probably like this book. Woman leaves a bad situation and tries to salvage her life and the lives of her children while also trying to find herself. Of course there is a romantic interest and another possible one to complicate the inevitable one. It is all so predictable that I knew how it would end by the end of the third chapter.

The writing is adequate but there are flaws that keep this from being a well written book. Too predictable and peopled with characters who stay on the page rather than leaping from them and into the reader's heart, this is a quickly read and forgotten novel. But if you don't like or feel a great deal of sympathy for Jo Sinclair by the end of the first few chapters you won't feel any by the end of the book. I know I didn't.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I was frustrated, while reading the novel, that obvious errors were not caught. Disneyworld is in Florida, not California. And when I read that Jo gave Victor a pocket watch I was utterly baffled. Not once had this pocket watch been mentioned prior to its magical appearance and yet she managed to not only get his pocket watch from his possession to have it repaired but she did so while living in a different state! Not once does Taylor-Hall hint at this gift prior to its manifestation, let share with the reader that Jo has a gift for Victor in mind. She just seems to drop the watch onto the page and presume that the reader will take the whole back story on faith, I suppose. I'm still trying to figure out how she managed to get the watch from him without his noticing.

Another example of almost the same thing occurs when Erica, her middle daughter, arrives for Christmas with no warning. Jo, not expecting Erica's visit, has no gifts for the girl. She sees a painting on the wall and the reader gets to hear all about how Jo found and bought the painting, etc. Naturally she wraps this painting up and gives it to Erica. A better way to present the painting to the reader would have been to have Jo hang it up as soon as her room was painted and ready for her to move into, have the back story shared in that earlier chapter. Then, when Jo makes the decision to give the painting to her daughter, the reader would have a better appreciation of it's intimacy and importance. As it is, the painting is thrown on the wall just in time for Jo to give it to her daughter. It's rather like Chekhov's mandate that if there's a knife on the wall in the first act it had better be used by the third--only in reverse where a knife appears by the third act where no knife was before.

These details, along with the predictability and poorly realized characters kept this novel from being anything more than adequate. It's a shame. I think the author has the ability to write better but I don't think I have the patience to read anything else she's read to ascertain if my intuition is correct or not.

This book tries to be literary and tries to explore the difficulties inherent in the mother-daughter relationship. The needs of each conflicting, and both sides of the story.

The main character is just a sad sack without a lot to recommend her. She's made a lifetime of bad choices, lived a sad life and passed the same on to her kids in various, uninteresting ways. Overall the story is sad and dull, and lacking in character vibrancy or sympathy.

In the end I was left with a "so what?" feeling. I suppose the mother's final decision is supposed to be somehow redeeming or at least hopeful but for me the story lacked any real conflict or resolution. It was just an ongoing drone of sadness.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 22 reviews  3.8 out of 5 stars