The Unwedding: Reese's Book Club Pick (a Novel)

There was a lot of subtle alcohol shaming in this book, ie people who drank also were judged, or did bad things, and sober people were viewed in a positive light. I googled about halfway through and yep, the writer is Mormon. It was very clear while reading that there was a bias.

The story itself was fine, but this book came with lots of black hair and pieces of dried skin stuffed in the pages. It was gross and I would have sent it back but I’m hosting book club in two days and I needed to read it. Sent from Bay State Books.

The layering was great, and the heart felt way she described the main character’s painful divorce was not in the author’s imagination. The author clearly lived this.

The setup and setting of this novel were promising--a woman dealing with unexpected divorce in Big Sur. However, this book quickly bogged down into so much detail, my head was spinning. There are so many guests/suspects, and so many descriptions---this isn't a quote, but things like "Steve went down the path to the waterfall holding the sculpture while Joe and Beth put on their rain ponchos, split off to the right and went to look for the dog, and Jemima stayed behind at the hotel to interview Bridget the maid."I had trouble holding all the various characters in my head and frankly, didn't care that much about who killed who.I think this book would work better as a limited TV series or movie, where you could see all the characters and "show" what's happening instead of "telling" the reader what's happening. (Kind of a "Glass Onion" thing.) But as a written work, it didn't work for me.

This was certainly a book with many twists and turns. It took until the end to find out, who killed who. There was a variety of personalities, in the characters. It was interesting how they became, friends for life!I loved the Big Sur area for the many landslides, it has had, to make it cut off from everything. It was believable!