My Rating: 2 stars
For me, this book was a huge disappointment and while I
wouldn’t say that I regretted reading it, I do wish that I had stood my ground a
bit more in terms of not accepting widgets for books that I wasn’t tremendously
interested in reading. Of course, I already
knew going into this book that it would be a story about the Kennedy family (albeit
a fictional story), more specifically about JFK and the love affair he
supposedly had with a woman named Alicia Corning Clark (Alicia Darr for most of
the story) in the early years prior to him becoming the 35th
President of the United States. I
actually had never heard of Alicia Corning Clark prior to reading this book and
being that this was an “imagined” story of the affair, I deliberately refrained
from looking up anything about her until after I finished reading, as I didn’t
want any preconceived understanding about who Clark was in real life to affect
my feelings toward her character in the story (more on this later). Despite the mention of “love affair” in the
book summary, I was fully expecting this story to lean more towards historical
fiction given the historical context with the Kennedy family, however it turned
out that this fell more heavily into the romance category. In addition, parts of the story felt a bit YA
to me, mostly due to the main female protagonist being in her early 20s for
much of the story, yet acting like a defiant teenager majority of the time,
plus the style of the writing felt less mature and many of the scenarios were
melodramatic (more about the writing later).
Unfortunately, both of these genres (romance and YA) are ones that I
don’t really care for, so this did put me off quite a bit.
Genre aside, there were actually quite a few things that
made this book a disappointment for me (hence the low rating), though
interestingly enough, in reading through the reviews, I seem to once again be the
outlier here, as there are a lot of 4 and 5 star ratings for this book and most
readers didn’t seem to have the same issues I did. It does make me wonder whether I actually
read the same book that everyone else read….
In any case, one of the things that frustrated me most
with this story were the characters and the way they were written, especially Alicia,
a character I disliked almost from the start.
Like I mentioned earlier, I didn’t know anything about the real-life
Alicia going into this (and I still don’t know that much about her to be quite
honest), so I can’t comment on how she compares to the real person, but to me,
Alicia in the story came off as a caricature and, at times, somewhat
stereotypical. Everything about Alicia
(the character) seemed to be contradictory in that her behavior never seemed to
sync up with her thoughts and more often than not, she would say one thing and
do the complete opposite. Don’t get me
wrong – I’m all for flawed characters in fictional stories and in fact, prefer
them over characters that come across too perfect, but in this case, I felt
like the author went a bit overboard in the opposite direction in that Alicia
seemed to have all her worst personality flaws exaggerated and brought into the
spotlight while her positive traits (aside from her looks of course – there was
constant reference to Alicia being “blonde and beautiful”) were mostly pushed
to the background. Most of the other characters as well were
depicted this way (negative personality traits magnified tenfold) -- though of
course, with the Kennedys, it’s not surprising given all the scandals and
rumors surrounding that infamous family, but still, given that this was a
fictional story, I was expecting the characterizations to be a bit more balanced. Instead, I felt at times that I was reading a
“tell-all” biography of sorts about the various transgressions of the Kennedy
family with an emphasis on JFK and the scandalous life he led (um, I think most
of us already know that JFK was a charmer who had numerous affairs both while
he was president and before that – I didn’t need this fact to be reinforced throughout
the story by depicting his character as a sex fiend who couldn’t seem to get
near a woman without wanting to have sex with her…it seemed like every couple
pages I was reading about either his or Alicia’s sexual exploits, which
honestly got tiring after like the 5th mention barely a quarter of the way
through the book….).
Plot-wise, there really wasn’t much there outside of Alicia’s
various relationship “adventures,” which honestly didn’t interest me much – in fact,
I felt bored reading the same repetitive bits about Alicia striking up a
relationship with one famous person after another (the second half of the book
was basically about Alicia’s “colorful” dating life -- the various people she
met and had flings with). Included in
this were details about Alicia’s 3 marriages, most notably the one to Alfred
Corning Clark, the heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune who left Alicia a hefty
fortune after his death within weeks of their marriage. This wealth came into play in a second
timeline taking place more than 60 years later, in 2016, when the executor of
the now deceased Alicia Corning Clark’s estate searches for a rumored potential
heir to all the money she left behind (a search that really did take place back
in 2016 and was reported on in the media). To be honest, this part of the story felt
like a completely different book, as the writing was more engaging and the narrative
was framed as a “mystery” of sorts that I actually wanted to get to the bottom
of – unfortunately, this second narrative was way too brief, only a few dozen
pages max, and the format of interspersing snippets of this narrative
sporadically throughout the main story meant that when I started skimming the book
at around the 25% mark (yes, things started getting repetitive very early in
the story), I ended up missing more of the second narrative than I intended.
Overall though, the issues I had with the story and the
unbalanced character depictions pale in comparisons to the problems I had with
the writing, which already wasn’t that great to begin with, but when you add tons
of grammatical errors to the mix, this became a tedious and exceedingly
frustrating read for me. I’m not sure if
this had to do with the ARC version I received being messed up somehow (or
perhaps the version I received was a very early rough draft), but it appears
that there was little to no editing to speak of with this book. The biggest issue I noticed is what I call
the missing “f” dilemma: all words that were supposed to have “ff” in them were
missing one “f” for some reason – so “offer” became “ofer,” “affair” became “afair,”
“off” became “of” etc. – these last two (missing “f” in the words “affair” and “off”)
were especially egregious given the extraordinary number of times both words
were used throughout the story (basically it was every few pages -- trying to differentiate
the instances between when the author was trying to use “off” versus “of” alone
ended up giving me a headache). As if
that weren’t enough, there were also sections where the narrative voice
switched back and forth in between dialogue, which really threw me off and made
this an even bigger chore to read. For example, there was a section where
one of Alicia’s friends George asks about her family back home – instead of
that section being written as a conversation between two people with dialogue set
apart by quotation marks as it was in most of the other parts of the book, it
was written in an odd half conversation half third person manner – George would
ask a question “But your mother…?” (only including part of the quote so as to
avoid spoilers) and instead of Alicia answering the question directly like we
would expect in a normal conversation, what followed was 7 paragraphs
explaining what happened to her mother but written in third person (i.e.:
Alicia left school, Alicia filled out a form, Alicia tried looking for her,
etc.) – then the next paragraph after that switches back to conversation mode
with George’s dialogue in quotations and Alicia’s response also in quotations,
but then the paragraph after that switches back to half and half mode
again. I thought at first this was just an isolated issue with that
particular section of the book and so was ready to ignore it and move on, but
then a dozen or so pages later, the same thing happened again, except this time
it was a “conversation” between Alicia and Jack (though this time, there was
the added confusion of switching from dialogue in quotes, to a third person
response, to a second person response, and then back to dialogue again).
For the most part, I tend to be a little more lenient with ARCs, since it
IS an uncorrected / unedited version after all, but this one was particularly
bad – I’ve read several dozen ARCs over the past 2 years and this is the first
time I’ve come across one with so many issues, mistakes that spanned every
couple pages. The only reason I didn’t DNF the book at this point was
because I had already made the decision earlier on (around the 25% mark as I
mentioned above) to skim through the rest of the book due to my inability to
connect with the story and majority of the characters, so I stopped paying as
much attention to these issues after that.
Obviously I wouldn’t recommend this book, but like I said
earlier, in reading through the many glowing reviews, I seem to be the only one
who had issues, so perhaps, unlucky for me, I just received a bad ARC version
of the book? I haven’t read any of this
author’s other works so there’s nothing for me to compare against in terms of
the writing. Probably those interested
in the Kennedy family will feel compelled to read this, though if so, I
recommend getting a library copy or a fully edited version. As for myself, I don’t intend on re-reading this
even if a “cleaned up” version becomes available, since the subject matter is
only mildly interesting to me anyway.
Received ARC from St. Martin’s Press via
NetGalley
