Delilah Green Doesn't Care

Hmmm...

I try to read “outside my genre” and I was intrigued by the setup on the back cover. I was also intrigued by how the back cover listed the author as a debut author, and then the About the Author caption listed her as the author of over five books that received wide acclaim. Perhaps she has a time machine.

The first scene pretty much sums up all the problems with this book. The MC wakes up after a casual hookup with a woman whose name she can't remember. A rich white woman whose name she can't remember. Every character is introduced as a “white woman” although men are merely mentioned and every character is white. The story proceeds from there into a fairly typical “beach house” sort of thing where the main character who isn't rich hangs out at country clubs and goes to brunch with people who are in a small town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest (it's either there or New England, right?). Except for the two people about to get married, everybody is trying to hook up like they're 24 years old. Even the people with kids. Even the single mom who right away is the love interest.

Other than the annoying habits the author has, such as the “white woman” mentioned above, and how all the characters are horribly irritating people, there is no tension in this story. The love interest is bisexual since her teenage years and everybody knows it, including the reader, including all the characters. There's no winning over of Claire, there's absolutely no doubt that they will at least hook up.

I picked up this book because I thought it would be an interesting window into the dynamics of lesbian relationships and expose some of the uniqueness of those relationships. Instead this is a caricature. I dare say it's a straight person's idea of what lesbians are like. Not that it's insensitive and not that I'm sensitive, but there's nothing to learn here. A more interesting story would have been these women as teenagers discovering themselves in this small town (where everybody is rich and drinks rose and has brunch every week). That's a story the author clearly thought of, but decided to write about them as adults, wherein everything is already determined and they can, honestly, do whatever they want.

So two stars because the author knows how to write. No higher because she chose to write the way she did.