The Fine Art of Insincerity
by Angela Elwell Hunt
Howard Books, 2011
320 pages
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
About the Book
Three grown Southern sisters have ten marriages between them—and more loom on the horizon—when Ginger, the eldest, wonders if she’s the only one who hasn’t inherited what their family calls “the Grandma Gene”: the tendency to like the casualness of courtship better than the intimacy of marriage.
Could it be that her two sisters are fated to serially marry, just like their seven-times wed grandmother, Mrs. Lillian Irene Harper Winslow Goldstein Carey James Bobrinski Gordon George? It takes a “girls only” weekend, closing up Grandma’s treasured beach house for the last time, for the sisters to really unpack their family baggage, examine their relationship DNA, and discover the true legacy their much-marrying grandmother left behind…
My Thoughts
Angela Elwell Hunt is one of my favorite writers, so I was very excited to see a new book from her. It did take me a few chapters to become immersed in the story, especially as each chapter is not only written from a different character’s perspective, but is also printed in a different font!
After a while, I stopped noticing the font changes and it became easier to keep track of who was speaking. It was fascinating to see how the sisters’ relationships changed as they dug deeper into their Grandmother’s possessions and into their own memories and perspectives of both the past and the present.
Although there were a couple of plot points that I felt were drawn out a bit too long, in the end I thought it was a good read.
Note: This is Book #70 of my 2011 Reads (master list here).
I'm a mom with Asperger's raising an amazing son with autism, which means I'm basically the case manager/advocate/cheerleader/chauffeur. The rest of the time, you can usually find me with my nose in a book!
