👶 Till Human Voices Wake Us, by Patti Davis

I felt as though the author may have attempted to tackle too many heavy subjects at once. The traumatic death of her child along with the predictable crumbling of her marriage leading to a love relationship with her sister-in-law would've sufficed for a novel with substance. Unfortunately, she felt it necessary to throw in the main character's depressing childhood along with her mother's incurable cancer, and people losing their homes to drought fires (really...); there was just too much to digest. With so much tragedy, one would assume the reader would feel some emotion, but aside from the pit in my stomach as the child's death was described, the rest of the novel did not move me at all.

Perhaps a reason for this detachment is the fact that their lives were so unrealistic. The women would spend their days in bed w/each other, & their evenings watching their daughter play in the ocean. Apparently once you marry into wealth, you never have to work again, even after a divorce and a subsequent commitment to someone else?! Call me ignorant, but I just don't see how one family member working at a women's shelter would afford the type of lifestyle they lived in Malibu.

I also became weary of the melodramatic scenes of these two maudlin lovers and had to roll my eyes more than once. It often read like a romance novel... which I just can't stomach. To boot, the plot line was flimsy at best, and I didn't connect with any of the under-developed characters.

Most annoying of all was the main character's countless rhetorical questions. Ugh! A true disappointment.

Read 7/23/13