Given the extremely limited time I have available for reading given my other commitments to staring absently out the window looking for explanations of How It Has All Come To This and What We Are To Do, I was extremely annoyed by Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful for taking up weeks of my reading time with the faint promise that it might realize itself into something good. It does not.
We follow Julia, Sylvie, Cecelia, and Emeline (lest we maybe miss the parallels to Little Women the book is sure to include direct scenes where the sisters act out or talk about being similar to those characters. Nothing inspires more confidence as a reader that your author trusts you that having the author literally explain the intended parallel) as they try to find love and purpose and family and meaning. Julia – type A extraordinary is only satisfied when she is giving order to someone else’s life and only feels herself come into her true power as a mother (#sure #whynot #ummm) – marries the ‘broken’ William (as with so much in this book any possible opportunity to make a theme literal is seized – so here the emotionally broken William who has absentee parents breaks his… knee. Again and again). But of course her sister, Sylvie, (like the Plath!) is on a quest for True Love (#sure #whynot #ummm) and ends up with William because they are soul mates who can see the brokenness of one another and “hold space” for that with one another. The other sisters do some things, too, and they are all trying to make sense of what it might be like to be adults without parents taking care of them, and to sort out where the bonds of sisterhood reach limits.
But please. It’s so saccharine and pat and convinced that you are not a reader who can be trusted to just understand a theme unless it is painfully explained.
I will not do the same. The thrust of this review is…. _________.