Casting About
Registered by chardark on 9/6/2018
2 journalers for this copy...
Journal Entry 2 by chardark at New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Thursday, September 6, 2018
Released 5 yrs ago (10/24/2018 UTC) at New Westminster, British Columbia Canada
CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:
planning to release at bookcrossing meetup. Unless my friends get to it first. :-)
Monica Brooks, our heroine, has a lack of self confidence which hampers her when she is faced with a new situation. It is easier to grasp the extent of this problem for her if you've read Spinning Forward, the book which precedes this one, but clarity is reached as she is faced with the need to bring her husband's daughter Clarissa Jo into the household. Monica is sure that she will never be able to be a mother to Clarissa, that the girl will never warm to her, that her failure will ensure the end of her marriage and so on.
Parenting is not easy any more than growing up is and Monica makes mistakes, each one proving that she is a disastrous failure, just as she predicted. Clarissa has her own problems, having been raised by a really spectacularly bad mother so that she too feels that she is a failure and an undesirable person. Dulong makes the mother really spectacularly bad in that she neglects the child completely except when she is a handy weapon to use against the father. I was going to say it was rather overplaying her hand until I remembered a family where the parents went drinking for hours on pay day and when the baby sitter was no longer available left them alone where I found the baby playing with a box of matches.
The story is set mostly on a tiny island on the west coast of Florida, a place determined to remain small. If I were living there I think I would really like there to be a local doctor, although I love the police officer's golf cart and the 20 mph speed limit.
I liked the characters, although I really have problems with Saren Ghetti's name. It was a pleasant read.
Parenting is not easy any more than growing up is and Monica makes mistakes, each one proving that she is a disastrous failure, just as she predicted. Clarissa has her own problems, having been raised by a really spectacularly bad mother so that she too feels that she is a failure and an undesirable person. Dulong makes the mother really spectacularly bad in that she neglects the child completely except when she is a handy weapon to use against the father. I was going to say it was rather overplaying her hand until I remembered a family where the parents went drinking for hours on pay day and when the baby sitter was no longer available left them alone where I found the baby playing with a box of matches.
The story is set mostly on a tiny island on the west coast of Florida, a place determined to remain small. If I were living there I think I would really like there to be a local doctor, although I love the police officer's golf cart and the 20 mph speed limit.
I liked the characters, although I really have problems with Saren Ghetti's name. It was a pleasant read.
