Winter White

I had read a lot of glowing reviews for Jennifer Closes's "Girls In White Dresses" so I was looking forward to reading it. I liked its format - it's not really a novel, but a series of short stories, somewhat inter-related because they are about a group of friends. And I love the quirkiness of the characters and the situations they get into - a young lady only dates "ugly" guys, a young woman finds out her old friend is dating her ex in college, another one goes on a horrid ski trip with her boyfriend - and separately they are really quite well-written pieces. But taken together as a whole, they do not form any kind of arc, and you felt like you were going nowhere with the stories. There were numerous times when I couldn't distinguish one character after another, and I thought it was my attention span, so I was kind of relieved to find on Amazon that other readers were having the same problem. The weird thing was, as good as some of these stories were, almost always I wanted to take a break from it. Most books, if interesting, have me wanting to not stop reading, while this one was the opposite. Maybe because I really did not like the characters: they were petty and catty towards each other and maybe I can charge all of that to the fact they are young, and with age you do know better. I kind of thought this book was a lot more adult, too, than the cover suggests, but its target audience may be younger. I did like that the title came from "My Favorite Things."

BC-3