Friday, September 21, 2012

Review: Dune Road

Dune Road
By Jane Green
Viking 2009
341 pages
From my shelves

Dune Road

Kit Hargrove is starting life over. She has divorced her distant Wall Street husband and found a beach side bungalow in Connecticut where she plans to put her life back together with her two kids. Kit finds a job through her neighbor as the assistant to the famous but reclusive writer Robert McClore. But just when Kit starts to find a rhythm, things start to fall apart. A mysterious woman shows up claiming a connection to Kit, something is wrong with a close friend, and Kit finds herself increasingly happy to see her ex in spite of the gorgeous man she has started dating. Dune Road is a look at the things that can break our relationships and the bonds that last through the hardest moments of life.

I started reading this book expecting something light but interesting. Ultimately, this one fell really flat for me. There were several moments where I wondered if this book had ever seen an editor before publication. The ways in which the characters spoke were so inconsistent - sometimes stilted and formal, but other times sounding like teenagers. What middle aged, divorced woman thinks "A date! A date! I have a date! And he's cute! Soooo cute! My ship may be coming in after all!"?

I also felt like Ms. Green began with a lot of really interesting ideas and then proceeded to give each and every one of her characters a really easy way out. Kit was a woman starting life over, but at the end of the book her life looks an awful lot like it did before the events of this book. Her friend Tracey has a secret past and the stakes could be so high for her character (and eventually for them all), but instead we get a tidy resolution without any real danger. Instead of creating an interesting relationship with the mysterious connection who shows up from Kit's past, she is exactly what they fear from the beginning.

This is not a terrible book. It's entertaining and it's a fast read. I was just disappointed because I could easily see the ways in which this book could be more. I have read some of her books before and as I started reading this one, I wondered if this was one of her first novels.  But Dune Road was published only a few years ago. While this would be an ok choice for a quick read, it's not Jane Green's best book. 

3 comments:

  1. Poor dialogue is the quickest way to put me off of a book. Boo :( It sounds like this one could have been much better with a bit of editing hmm?

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    1. Yup, the editor inside of me got very grumpy reading this book. I think that is when it is most frustrating, when you can see how it could have been better...but it's not.

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  2. I felt the same way about this one. It was a disappointment because I am generally a fan of this author.

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