The writing was good and some of the characters were well formed, but I did not care for the pedestrian story that much. ( )

Wow, I hated this. Only my hatred for this petty, poorly written book kept me going to finish it. Also, it was short. And I'm waiting for a book to be available at the library, and didn't want to start something else right now.

This is basically a short story stretched out to a book with disjointed scenes of life as a parent. Characters are introduced briefly, and then disappear forever. I think the disjointed scenes were supposed to be satire, maybe? The characters were strangely obsessed with how a neighbor's affair was going to affect their own lives. Do people think like this? Oh, and the book was judgmental and profoundly anti-female.

The whole thing just made me sad for readers who deserve better books. At least I borrowed it from the library so I didn't spend any money on it. Read this if you want a shallow book that is easy to put down because nothing is really happening in it and you're fascinated by descriptions of housework and carpool duty. Skip if you have anything better to do at all. ( )

This is a wonderful novel of human beings doing human things, and of how a neighborhood of fond acquaintances and some friends can be thrown off course by the act of one of them. It is also hopeful, which in this case I found touching; because it was not hopeful because they - or any of them - became perfect but because some of them were open to accepting the others as humans doing human things. ( )

Authors want to write characters their readers can identify with, but I doubt many adults of a certain age want to escape into a book about an overweight 40-something being tortured by her teenager and living in a fine-enough but boring and sexless marriage. Also the charming writing I enjoyed so much in the author's last book got a little cloying here, and by the end I was wishing the main character didn't have a snappy retort to every freakin thing anyone else said. ( )

This was a perfectly pleasant way to pass some time. ( )