Abandoned by Booklikes

Please note that I gave this book 1.5 stars and rounded it up to 2 stars on Goodreads.

Something nice: I liked the cover and the first few chapters of the book actually flowed together okay. That said, this book was too all over the place for me to ever get a handle on while reading.

I am going to try to quickly summarize and apologize in advance if nothing makes any sense. Three longtime friends (Elizabeth, Andrew, and Zoe) all were part of a college band that wrote a hit song that their now dead friend (Lydia) is famous for she still gets kudos for even though Elizabeth was the one who wrote it.

Now in their 40s (I assume, I refuse to look up people's ages) the trio is asked about signing away their rights in order for a movie to be made about Lydia's life.

While that plot plays out, we also have Zoe unhappy with her decades long marriage to her wife Jane and is struggling with what to do next. Zoe's wife Jane is a chef who is primarily focused on work and jealous of anyone that Zoe pays attention to for more than 5 minutes.

Although Elizabeth is happy in her marriage, she is going through a case of what if's right now. Andrew is in the middle of a mid-life crisis that he is trying to cure by going to the most fake yoga teacher ever. Then we have Elizabeth and Andrew's son who has a long simmering crush on Jane and Zoe's daughter, Ruby.

So there are six people in this book and it was so not fun to have to read through six separate POVs. All of characters felt like they were in a different book.

Elizabeth was apparently a great songwriter, but the only clue readers are given is that she writes a song that keeps repeating the words "I am calm, calm, calm" and that's all we get. I mean if you are going to make a character a great songwriter, maybe have an actual song for readers to read.

Also we kept hearing about how the song Lydia is known for Mistress of Myself was great too, and once again, we don't see any lyrics to that song either. There was a lot of "tell" going on in this book and not enough show.

Zoe and Jane are barely in this book. Zoe apparently hasn't really loved her wife since their daughter was born. Since Ruby is now 18, that means she has stayed married to someone for almost 18 years she doesn't really care for at all. Jane is jealous and cooks. That's all I got about her character. The character of Harry was interesting, but seriously naive and gullible as anything. Ruby was almost an ass through the whole book. In the end, she seems to be the only one with any sense in this book.

The writing was just okay. Each chapter was pretty short. The overall plot about Lydia's song and movie didn't fit in this book at all. At one point I wondered why Emma Straub just didn't include Lydia's POV since everyone else was in here.

The flow was terrible. Trying to juggle six different character POVs just didn't work at all. The book was all over the place. Reading about two couples going through some hipster nonsense was not an engaging read. Reading about two teenagers wasn't interesting either. None of these people really had anything to complain about in their lives.

The setting of Brooklyn has never been so unappealing to me in my life. Nothing about Brooklyn comes alive in this book. Most of the action takes place in people's homes, a restaurant, or Harry and Zoe's SAT course. I needed something to make the story jump out at me. Instead everything falls flat.

The ending of this book wraps things up via newspaper articles and no, just no. I have a hard time believing any of these things since we don't seen an inking for the set-up to these stories except for Jane and Zoe.