PillowByRiver

This book touched many topics about women such as feminist, sex slaving, cheating, lesbian, etc. It is not bad to touch all the topics, and not bad to read some of the arguments in the book. But as an overall story, every character is so stereotypical that it is not convincing at all. Readers can also vaguely feel that the authors are just glorifying the "wonderful" all-woman Smithie college from which the author herself graduates from, and assigning bad names to most males.

At first, I just had this confusion that why they automatically became friends. You have 300 pages with very small font words. Can't you spare some space to ease us into accepting how they became good friends.

Bree's going back and forth between leaving her lesbian partner Lara and dating a man, is not convincing. It simply changes too fast. Since graduation, Bree had wanted to leave Lara because lack of approval from her family. She directly said without any hesitation that the she would "never" be able to present this relationship openly to her friends and family. Then right after Lara left her, she suddenly called her the love of her life. After dating handful of men during her stay with Celia at New York, she went back to San Fransisco to pack her stuff, and pursued Lara with all she has again. Seriously, this mood swing is too fast and if she has always loved Lara this deep, why all I read from the book is all her complaints against Lara?

Also, the description of Lara is so stereotypical--an Asian girl with short hair who's totally a hard-core lesbian. I cannot even count how many of such characters I've seen in movies and books. How does this stereotype even come? The story about how she and Bree fell in love at college is touching. But after graduation, she just became a stereotypical person that's not lovable at all.

Sally's husband, Jake, is like this insanely perfect husband that only exists in illusion. He is happy all the time, is enthusiastic about anything, is always tolerant of Sally's mood swing. BTW, he is also incredibly rich that right after the marriage they have a house with 5 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms. I am not saying this is necessarily impossible. But the author writes so little about him. His sole job in this book is to be perfect--all the time. That's it.

The ending part is especially disappointing that you know from the beginning what the truth are, but the author spends a quarter of the book describing how all other girls were so worried about April's disappearance and thought she was dead. The end chapter is not twisting at all, and is filled with unnecessary argument with how males are cruel. You have made such points repeatedly throughout the book. Right now I only worry about what happened to April. This chapter made me take another star off to make the final rating as 2 stars.