The Girls of August by Anne Rivers Siddons

Accusations of assault, sabotage, and affairs abound, and in the end.well, the ending came out of no where and made absolutely no sense. The women spend most of their trip bitching, sniping, and being generally unfriendly to the new wife and eventually even to each other. The story itself was jumbled and made no sense. These women were vacationing on a beautiful semi-private island off the coast of South Carolina and Siddons spent more time describing the decor of the house and the details of their food than the supposedly beautiful locale. The writing was painfully simple and uninspired. Apparently this was because some of them were 'going through things.' I didn't find this in the least bit believable. Grown women were catty, sarcastic, and downright cruel and bullying to one another.

What Siddons did reveal about their personalities through their behaviors was so hateful and mean that I couldn't imagine she was writing about characters she liked. Until one of the characters began acting erratic and a major life event was revealed about halfway through the book, I honestly kept confusing two of the characters because there was so little depth to either of their characters. The characters were flat, cardboard people that Siddons apparently couldn't be bothered to develop. I was looking forward to a sweet, touching book about women supporting each other through their friendships, and instead I got a ridiculous, scrambled book about women acting like mean middle school girls. Had it taken more than two or three hours to read this book, I would have put it down. At 240 pages it was a quick read, which was an incredibly good thing. I'm not entirely sure where to start with this review, because I almost didn't finish the book.

The Girls of August by Anne Rivers Siddons