A Review: The Crazyladies of Pearl Street by Trevanian

Overall Rating:

Tuesday is for Book Club rates this a 0 out of 5

Jenna chose this book thinking it would be a quirky read. She thought it would be about women going through tough times, but that it would have a positive or more humorous spin to it. She did not expect pages of the author's tangents.

Would we recommend to a friend? A resounding NO.

This copy will be available for purchase soon.

Review:

For the first time, in our book club's history, all 4 of us DNF (did not finish) this book! We have read several flops over the last 5 years but typically we finish the books even when we dislike them. In fact, sometimes we continue to read a bad book just for the enjoyment of getting together to trash it. Now, what was so terrible about The Crazyladies of Pearl Street? Well, in this case, I think there was more to it than it just being unexpected.

1. We just came off of a "bad book" spree. The last few books we read were rated poorly. I think we were exhausted with the bad reads and had little patience left. I personally feel like I could have finished this book had we read it at another time. 
2. A couple of our members have also been going through a tough time and we feel our overall negative attitudes could also have played in to our lack of desire to read / be patient with this story.

With that being acknowledged, we still did not like this book and I'm sure the rating still would have been very low. This book was unusual. Honestly, the start really intrigued me, this idea of a family following after this con-man daddy. I could fully visualize them sitting on the stoop with all of their belongings, taking in Pearl Street. I felt sadness for this little boy having to grow up so fast. This storyline quickly disintegrated. 

Basically, after that, we went on a tour of this young man's mind. We went down a lot of rabbit holes that were not interesting with sprinkles of things that were. The parts that were interesting, never felt complete and we felt torn away too soon from them.

We wanted more from the evocative title, The Crazyladies of Pearl Street. It was just page after page of events, details and more details in a very listless manner. We said we were done halfway through and then just to be sure, I tried to read it once again. I skimmed the first sentence of each paragraph to see what he was going on about ... but there it was, nothing had changed, page after page of events, details and more details. Flipping page after page, not finding much that piqued my interest enough to stop and read.