I happened to see this novel on the shelf at a thrift shop while I was reading the last one… so I got it.  Familiar author and all.
She’s very readable, but unless I’m missing some great point,  she really seems to not like men a lot.  Except the cliche gay best friend to man bash with.  […]

This is about a group of woman.  Five.  Hence the title.  Clever, that.
They all had a story, disturbances, childhood memories, pasts.  It was meant to be a story, I think maybe inspiring, of survival.
But really,  if you wanted to, you could call everyone a survivor.  Everyone has been through something.  Everyone has a past, a […]

This one seemed to have a lot of potential.  The idea was good.  The story was… good.  Or it could have been. 
I hated the way it was written.  I didn’t like this fellows style at all.  None of the characters came off as especially likeable, or real, or endearing, or brave… or anything.  There […]

I think that it was the simplicity of this book that grabbed me.  Not the characters, or their stories, because they weren’t simple.  But the style that it was written in.  It was very good and had a lot of rather unexpected meaningful commentary.  The characters, and their stories, in a tiny nothing town in […]

"Hastily, I transferred the snow to the burning part of the mattress and extinguished it, I thought, but an hour or so after I went back to sleep, the smoke revisited me.  Bounding out of the bed again, I went for a jug of water and sloshed it all over the spifflicated Paterson.  The man […]