Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

 TL;DR: Meh.

Hello Beautiful is the newest from Ann Napolitano.  Full disclosure, I've haven't read Dear Edward and I'm 99% sure I never will. Lots of people like this book, Oprah picked it for her book club, so let's see how this New York Times bestseller works for me. 

William Waters marries into a family with four girls after spending his life with chilly parents who basically never see him after they drop him off at college. We spend this book following William and these girls who are Julia, Cecelia, Emeline, and Sylvie.  That's it. That's the plot. It's Little Women set in more modern times if Marmee were a bit more complicated. There are marriages, babies, divorces, deaths, hospitalizations, terrible decisions, moves, and more terrible decisions. It's a soap opera in a book.

If you are from a large family, much of this will ring true. It will stab you in the heart when there's a scene that mirrors a scene exactly from your very own family history.

If you are from a smaller family, this may seem exaggerated and silly, over the top, as if you are watching a Mexican telenovela and you are trying to figure out the motivations of these people when their motivations are exceptionally opaque.

No matter who you are, both of those interpretations are legitimate.

The writing in this book is delicious. It's clear, but it's also descriptive and vibrant and her description of people is divine. She somehow makes the mundane captivating and let's give it to Napolitano for the ability to make me think it might be somehow romantic to be in the midst of a Chicago winter. (Note for non-Midwesterners: There is nothing romantic about winter in Chicago at all. It's grey and dreary and there's always a cold wind off the Lake, and you should always capitalize Lake when referring to a Great Lake and now it's possible that you know more about my internal dialogue when reading this kind of book than you wanted to know.)

But, you guys. It was a true struggle to get through the first chapter. There is so much basketball. And that continues throughout much of the first half of the book. I think we all know by now that I have strong opinions about sports in books (I do not care for it), so this was maybe not the right foot for me to start this book on.  What I'm saying is that if you, too, want to stop or think you might stop because of the endless descriptions of basketball games, drills, and/or the history of individual games and players, you are not alone. I do like people writing enthusiastically about things they like even if I don't really enjoy those things, but the sports parts of this book were a real slog. For a lot of the first half of the book.

But there's also an easy comparison out there these days. If this book is to Little Women as Demon Copperhead is to David Copperfield, well, Demon Copperhead is going to win every time. What Kingsolver does with developing Demon's voice as he ages and paralleling the source material was so ambitious and effective that it makes Hello Beautiful look like a pale imitation of what contemporary literature can be. 

Beckett over at The Birchwood Pie Project wrote that this book made her cry. The actual quote is: Normally when I say that something made me cry, I mean that I dropped a few tears and maybe had to blow my nose. This was a big fat looong ugly sob fest where the Kleenex was not optional.

Well, let me assure you, dear readers. I did not cry, let alone sob. I did not actually see why I would cry? Because this book is so much like a soap opera, I sort of assume characters have evil twins and will come back to life. What's to grieve? What I'm saying here is that the characters in this book seemed somehow unreal and the over-topness of the family melodrama meant the characters never really fully became enmeshed in my heart.

I mean, I'm all for a book that will make me cry, even if the authors use cheap tricks to make me cry. 

A Little Princess and The Secret Garden by France Hodgson Burnett have made me cry. That scene with Neville and the gum wrapper in The Order of the Phoenix. Devastating. Ugly crying. The scene in Just Listen when Annabel's sister has to give her a bra and the family dynamics are just so true that I was gutted. Let's not talk about the entirety of A Closed and Common Orbit in which I remember vividly having to tell my husband that I was okay because I was shaking the bed from crying so hard and trying to hide from him that I was crying. And the entire Katherine Stone catalog, with her emotional manipulation, gets me every time (Happy Endings and Pearl Moon will never be anything other than true sentimental torture). 

Anyway, Hello Beautiful is a good book. But it's far from a great book. (4.26 on Goodreads be damned!) It might make you cry, but it probably won't.

3/5 stars

Lines of note: 

She seemed to think his skinniness reflected badly on her, because feeding him was her job. (page 6)

My father-in-law's wife once pulled me aside to ask me if my husband had lost some weight. I was immediately defensive because his health is MY JOB and took a very good look at him, examining his face and shoulders and then I sighed with relief. He shaved his beard. Yeah, he did look leaner. There's no beard to hide every line of his skull.

It was so easy for Kent to make friends - everyone liked him - that William wondered why Kent chose to spend his time with him. (page 12)

Doesn't everyone have a friend like this? You're sort of envious of them, but you're also so happy to be in their orbit?  

Cecelia was saying, in a serious voice, "You have an excellent nose, William."

"Oh," William said, clearly surprised. "Thank you?"

Julia grinned. "Don't mind Cecelia. She talks that way because she's an artist." Cecelia had special access to the art room at the high school and she considered everything in her sightline to be source material for future paintings. The last time Julia - intrigued by the focused expression on Cecelia's face - asked her sister what she was thinking about, Cecelia had said, "Purple."

"You do have a nice nose," Emeline said politely, because she'd noticed William blush and wanted to make him feel better. Emeline read the emotional tenor of every room and wanted everyone to feel comfortable and content at all times. (page 19-20)

This scene. It's such great writing. You get a feel for William's discomfort around others, Cecelia's artsy worldview, and Emeline's caretaking bent. This is writing doing everything writing is supposed to do. 

Rose turned toward William and said, "After the wedding, you'll call me Mom, or Mama. Not more Mrs. Padavano."

She glared at him while she said this, but he could feel another message being delivered with her eyes. She regretted that his parents weren't coming to the wedding, and she regretted that his parents didn't love him. She would love him, to fill their absence. (page 51)

My mother-in-law gave me the biggest hug the first time we met. Bigger than any hug I've ever had from a family member who is related to me by blood. I will never forget the generosity of her welcoming me into her family or how good it felt to be surrounded by her love.

There was an infrastructure of grudges that had shaped Charlie's and Rose's extended families and kept them away from one another. (page 69)

This. This book cut deep. In our family, you have to be pretty quick to keep track of who is not speaking to who and who's mad at Uncle Andy this time. My own father didn't talk to his sister for the better part of two decades and I only met my paternal grandfather in person one time because my father never spoke to his own father. I like this image of an "infrastructure of grudges" because it seems so right. (Also, I don't not talk to my father's side of the family, but I don't talk to them either. I don't get invited to family events - my sister does - so I just stay away from the whole mess. My cousin got married in the last year or so and I was not invited. My sister asked me if I was going and I told her I wasn't invited and my sister said, in a generous way, that I could be her guest. But I didn't go. Because you don't go where you're not wanted, right? If I see them at things, I talk to my family members, so it's not dire, but it's not great.)

When Sylvie looked back on that moment - now, from the funeral pew, and later, over the course of her life - it would always be one of her great joys that her father had said this to her and that she was able to delight him by paraphrasing one of his favorite poems: "We are not contained between our hats and boots." (page 73)

I will now be finding the word hat in every book I read. Please readers, feel free to just ignore this quirk of mine.

Wherever she was staying, she went into the bathroom first think in the morning and studied herself in the mirror. She had never done this before. She'd never been particularly vain or interested in her appearance, but now she needed to remind the girl standing in front of the mirror that she was roughly the same person day after day. (page 115-116)

I frequently find myself staring at my reflection in the mirror wondering how I got here. Day to day it's the same, but my face is so different from even five years ago. 

Several times, Izzy [10-year-old] shook her head and said, "Adults are idiots. My goal is to grow up and not be an idiot." (page 273)

This should be every child's goal.

She carried a book at all times - to read, yes, but also as a handy shield for when she wanted to deflect the attention of other people. She would position a book in front of her face and think, or simply hide. (page 308)

Do you use a book (or your phone) as a prop to avoid people? Like, if you're eating by yourself, you have a book out just so people won't try to talk to you? Are there people who don't do this?

Thing I looked up:

Sever's disease (page 126) - An inflammation at the back of the heel growth plate in growing children brought on by repetitive stress, generally children involved in running and jumping sports. 

Other things I wrote down on my notes for this book:

Page 217!!!!

*must read Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman