The Ninth Wife

In my attempt to avoid the Game of Thrones books for a while (I'm hoping to draw the story out and not ravenously consume the remaining three books in like a week), I picked up this one off my library shelves.

The Ninth Wife by Amy Stolls

I spent half the book wishing I had gone ahead with Game of Thrones.

This book is about 35-year old folklorist, Bess Gray.  Just as she has resigned herself to the idea of being single, she meets Irish-American fiddler and charmer, Rory, and falls in love.  It comes out later that he has been married a whopping 8 times.  The book goes back and forth from her current perspective, to his marriage history, and then back to her issues dealing with her aging grandparents and mysterious, gay neighbor, Cricket.

Overall, my opinion is "meh."  But I have to say I did read the whole thing, which is saying something.  The story had just enough twists and turns, just enough good descriptions and interesting tidbits to keep me reading.  It is an involved plot, with some complex issues the characters face.  But many of her descriptions fall very flat: she presents the fighting (Jewish) grandparents in such a stereotypical way that it reads like something out of a beginning Creative Writing class.  Bess lives in D.C. and some of her outings read like a tourist brochure.  For such an involved plot, I found myself not really caring about the characters and their struggles, because I didn't feel they were well-developed.  Instead, I found myself reading simply to see how it would turn out in the end.

So maybe I should just say that the story was interesting but the writing was marginal.  Not bad, but not good.  I have to say this is the first book I've written about on the blog that I would not recommend.   I even thought about recommending it as a plane book, or a beach book, but way too many better reads come to mind (e.g. anything by Jodi Picoult, Anne Lamott, David Sedaris).

This is one that will be traded in for a credit at my fave book store soon. 

That said, Happy Saturday!  And happy reading!