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I just finished reading a great new book, A Good Hard Look By Ann Napolitano. Apparently now I'm supposed to tell you about it. I've never done a book review before, so this is all new to me. I hope I don't muff it too bad or scare people off from reading the book, that would probably be bad.
A Good Hard Look is a well spun story of several people, young and old, at important intersections in their lives. It's set in the dreamy steamy town of Milledgeville Georgia over an almost two year span. The characters lead mostly ordinary lives which made reading about them easy and almost too comfortable. As if I could be that woman living penny to penny waiting for her husband's promotion or a grudge carrying beautiful girl scarred by a woman she hardly knows. I'm neither of those, BUT I sympathized with the characters, the sign of a great book, for me anyway. I wanted to feel for them and Ann Napolitano delivers that exquisitely in A Good Hard Look. From Flannery crippled by lupus, to Lona crippled by boredom, to Melvin crippled by trying to please his wife, they are all very real but not all particularly likable. Then one terrible afternoon causes all of them to take a good hard look at their lives and move on.
The choices some of the characters made were really hard to read about. I wanted to shout out a couple times "DO NOT KISS HIM" or "NO, DON'T DO THAT". I didn't but I wanted to, I'm pretty sure my kids would've been freaked out by their mother shouting at a book. But those bad choices kept me coming back, I simply HAD to find out what happened next. I found it hard to put down at night and sometimes I woke up with it laying across my face and my reading lamp still on. Another sign of a good book.
I finished it about 4 days ago and I'm still thinking about it, another good sign! If you like a good story, a well delivered one that you want to pick up and read, give A Good Hard Look, a good hard read. I loved it and anyone who loves a good story will love it too.
