This wasn’t like, horribly monstrously bad. But it was still not very good. It’s the story of Jessie Sullivan, a married woman in her forties, who goes home to this tiny island after she hears that her mother has had a nervous breakdown. Said nervous breakdown manifests as her mother intentionally cutting off one of her fingers. While back home, Jessie falls in love with a monk from the monastery that’s next door to her mother’s house. Meanwhile, her mother continues to act like a crazy person, but nobody really does anything about it.
The only thing that kept me reading this book was trying to find out why the mother cut her finger off. That was it. And it turned out to really not be worth knowing. The romantic story line between the main character and the monk is stupid. Neither is a particularly well-written character, and I’m not sure why they fell in love in the first place. The mother’s friends are obnoxious and useless.
This is definitely one of those books that could have been ended a lot sooner if someone had just told the truth 20 years ago. Sometimes those books work (Jojo!), but sometimes they fall flat. In a particularly annoying twist, the mother desperately needed a psychologist, and Jessie’s husband is actually a psychologist, but obviously she can’t call him for any help because of all the monk sex.
It’s supposed to be a story about regret and choices and that sort of thing, but instead it’s the least interesting book I’ve ever read about a woman cutting off her own finger