Review: Summer Rental by Mary Kay Andrews

Summer Rental by Mary Kay Andrews

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I generally love Mary Kay Andrews ... I find her books nice places to retreat in between the heavier fiction that I seem to read a great deal. They are fun escapist novels for me. And this one was a pretty standard chick lit kind of book. Nothing earthshaking. Nothing that knocked me off of my chair. It's a bit disappointing as her earlier novels were very strong. I think they were the best of the chick lit genre. This one just doesn't live up to those earlier novels.

This one is literally a light beach read. It's about a group of women and their experiences during a month-long girls vacation to the beach. It focuses on friendship and love as most of these sorts of books do. It's very light, very easy to read. Nothing difficult in the pages of this novel. If you want something light, a vacation of sorts, this might be of interest to you. However, I think that there are MANY other chick lit novels that do that very thing much better than this novel. Earlier Mary Kay Andrews books, for example!

I found the plot lines of this novel to be pretty predictable and not all that engaging. I knew what was happening and what was coming. No surprises and nothing unique. There were times when I rolled my eyes at the 'twists and turns' of the plot. They were almost annoying in their predictability!

The characters didn't wow me ... they were okay (and often boring), but no characters really stood out as a fantastic character. They were all pretty broadly written, not given a lot of individuality. The hardest thing for me with this novel was the dialogue. It felt very clunky and unreal. It was not seamless, in fact it felt forced. It made the experience of reading much less enjoyable than it could have been.

Overall, I was quite disappointed in this novel. Which is sad for me as a Mary Kay Andrews fan. I wish I could recommend it but I'd suggest you check out her earlier novels (Hissy Fit is my personal favorite) instead. This book just doesn't do her writing justice!

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