At once small Southern hometown and bigtime world-traveling interests, Cross-Smith pours bits of herself into these four besties to create a nostalgically familiar flavor ... Cross-Smith’s incredible, easy voice will make your skin crawl one moment and give you goosebumps the next, then smooth out your frazzled emotions with a contented, sunshiny vibe two pages later.
While full of the author’s trademark prose—sensitive and complex, deeply intimate and emotionally intricate—the book can be confusing with its abundance of supporting characters and backstories. It reads like Sweet Magnolias meets Kill Bill, but the juxtaposition isn’t always successful, as it either cheapens the sweet moments or doesn’t quite match the seriousness of the bad ones.
Cross-Smith has crafted a dense story of devoted friendship against the backdrop of an overwhelming number of minor characters. The rotating third-person perspective combined with the amount of exposition makes it difficult for a compelling central story to rise to the surface, and once it finally does, the tension is too easily resolved, without the seriousness of violent events ever being fully recognized.
Lackluster ... Cross-Smith’s villains are cartoonishly evil... and though the friends’ motivations are understandable, the story nonetheless feels contrived.
