It wasn't that long ago that I bestowed the worst book award on something I read. Unfortunately for me, another book has already come along that eclipsed it- The Room-Mating Season by Rona Jaffe. I had previously read and enjoyed The Best of Everything, so I decided to look for another book by Rona Jaffe. The Room-Mating Season looked like the most promising of the few that the library had, and was partially set during the same time period of the 1960s, so I decided to give it a try. It turned out to be one of the worst books I've ever read!
I hate to rant on and on with negative comments, but there's no way around it in this case. This book felt like something written by a different writer who was trying to mimic The Best of Everything- the author even plagiarized herself, using a scene that was nearly identical to one in that book. The writing on the whole was just horrible, with way too much exposition. It felt like you were reading a rough outline of plot, not a finished novel. When there was an actual scene thrown in, it was filled with cheesy dialogue said by stereotypical characters. And whenever the time jumped forward in the story, there would be a paragraph that went something like "It was 1980. Reagan was president, the economy was booming, women were joining the workforce...", as if the reader would have no idea what the culture of a particular time period had been. I really have to think that either this was written by some kind of ghostwriter, or that the author really lost her touch since writing The Best of Everything. I actually made it through the whole book, mostly out of a sense of disbelief at seeing how much worse the book could manage to get. Stay far, far away from this book. It's what I'll be doing in the future with anything written by Rona Jaffe!
I hate to rant on and on with negative comments, but there's no way around it in this case. This book felt like something written by a different writer who was trying to mimic The Best of Everything- the author even plagiarized herself, using a scene that was nearly identical to one in that book. The writing on the whole was just horrible, with way too much exposition. It felt like you were reading a rough outline of plot, not a finished novel. When there was an actual scene thrown in, it was filled with cheesy dialogue said by stereotypical characters. And whenever the time jumped forward in the story, there would be a paragraph that went something like "It was 1980. Reagan was president, the economy was booming, women were joining the workforce...", as if the reader would have no idea what the culture of a particular time period had been. I really have to think that either this was written by some kind of ghostwriter, or that the author really lost her touch since writing The Best of Everything. I actually made it through the whole book, mostly out of a sense of disbelief at seeing how much worse the book could manage to get. Stay far, far away from this book. It's what I'll be doing in the future with anything written by Rona Jaffe!
Oh no! I'm so disappointed to hear that. I guess The Best of Everything was so good that it drained all of the talent right out of her.
ReplyDelete