Review: The Hope Chest (by Viola Shipman)

My Rating:  3.5 stars

I actually struggled a bit with the rating for this book. On the one hand, this book didn’t blow me away or impress me from a literary aspect or make me reflect on a deeper level like most of the books I rate 4 or 5 stars usually do. However, it also doesn’t deserve a low rating either (for reasons I’ll talk about below). In the end, I settled for 3.5 stars, with the “disclaimer” that if you’re trying to decide whether to read this book or not, I would say go by the review comments rather than the star rating.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It was an easy read, very simple in its message of hope and love and the meaning of family. As described in the summary, this book is about Mattie, an elderly woman battling ALS, and her devoted husband of 50 years, Don, who is unable to imagine a future life without his soulmate and the love of his life. A young single mother named Rose is assigned as Mattie’s caregiver and together with her 7-year-old daughter Jeri, they help the elderly couple find hope and faith again. There is also Mattie’s hope chest and all the heirlooms in it, which play a central role in connecting everyone together.

From a literary standpoint, this book is well-written and flows amazingly well despite jumping back and forth between different time periods (seems like the switching of timelines back and forth is a technique of choice for many authors nowadays). The author is descriptive and makes each scene come alive, to the point that I felt like I was watching a movie in my head. Yet, the dialogue is simple enough that it is easy to understand and most importantly, doesn’t interrupt the flow of the story. Though the story itself is not necessarily unique and doesn’t stand out amongst the many similar-themed stories out there, it was written well enough to evoke an emotional response from readers like me who may not have connected deeply with the story, but still found it moving and heartfelt. In terms of the characters -- though all of them were likable and easily relatable, I kind of felt that the author went a little overboard with a few of the characters and the roles they played in the story, which caused some of the characters to come across as a not quite believable. Luckily this did not affect the flow of the story much.

One thing about the book that made me struggle with the scoring was the predictability of the story and, in a way, the over-simplicity of the storyline. From the first page, I pretty much already knew what was going to happen and by the end, all the pieces of the story pulled together exactly the way I thought it would. Though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing per se, in this instance it did take away some of the fun of reading a book and being (pleasantly or unpleasantly) surprised at things that happen outside of what is expected. This was one of the main reasons why, despite enjoying the book and liking the story and characters overall, it was hard for me to get too excited about this book or give it a higher rating than I did.

 Received advance reader's copy from St. Martin’s Press via NetGalley (expected publication date: March 21st, 2017).

(Read in February 2017)