Goes down easy but with a nasty aftertaste.

I found this to be surprisingly clunky - uneven dialog that often didn't ring true, and though the premise of the characters was interesting they kept reverting to type and making me roll my eyes. For all that, I'm never lost reading momentum and I actually enjoyed it. The story was good, the ideas were fun, and it never quite scared me off. Makes me really want to read What Was She Thinking?, though, because I've heard such uniformly good things about it -- now I'm curious how that one hit where this one misses.

That's interesting, Claire--I've heard the same comment from various people, but I never thought of Rosa or Karla as unlikable.

The characters in this novel are almost universally unlikeable (or at the least, annoying), but I still enjoyed their story and the sharp, perceptive writing.

I want to write a bit more about Rosa's storyline. It is the book's big weakness, in my opinion; it was the entire reason I picked up the novel, but one gets the sense that Heller doesn't really understand why her character might be drawn to Orthodoxy or why she would ever be interested in changing her life so dramatically. She shows Rosa questioning the rabbi's beliefs and the enthusiasm of Carol (a Jew by choice), not to mention the status of women in Orthodox Judaism, but then the story just stops and picks up again when (spoiler, I guess, but really not that much one of one) Rosa decides to enter a yeshiva. Huh? I felt like Heller had decided in advance that Rosa would embrace religion, but had no idea how to make it happen credibly.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book once I let myself sit down with it. Laura Miller's Salon review compares it to Zadie Smith's On Beauty, but it reminded me more of Anne Tyler, if Tyler were to abandon Baltimore for Manhattan.

It's easy to find problems with the book--Lenny is underwritten, even for a secondary character; the story of Rosa's interest in Orthodox Judaism isn't well-developed--but it kept me interested, which is more than I can say for most of the books I'm picking up these days. Karla and Audrey are both compelling, interesting characters; I loved Karla's storyline. So despite the flaws, the book is well worth reading.

Just got my notice that this pre-order has shipped. I am looking forward to it!