Happy April! This month I read Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler. I’m not going to lie I was initially drawn to this book by the glass of wine on the cover. No shame in my game. It is described as a coming of age story. (I love this tag line because every time I say it my husband always responds with “I have no idea what that means.”)
It is about a young girl fresh out of college who moves to New York (nothing new here…). She gets a job at a famous restaurant and then the book follows her as she tries to build a life for herself. It (somewhat) explores her relationships with her coworkers and how she educates herself to be an integral valued part of the restaurant business. There is of course a doomed-from-the-start relationship. What’s a story without a little romance? There is also a lot of drugs, sex and alcohol. This is usually a recipe for success. Well, not in this case!
This book is allegedly a New York Times bestseller but now that I’ve read it I don’t know how that is possible. All the characters are incredibly underdeveloped. Even the main character when you really look back at it. At some points the writing style of the book changes (in a pretty pretentious way) which I dislike. And then it will go back to the original writing style. I found this annoying and unnecessary. The book is really slow to start. I kept putting it down and then struggling to pick it back up again for weeks. This is so unlike me. It does finally pick up in the final third of the book. I was at this point just hooked enough to wonder how it was going to play out. I was then extremely bummed out by the ending. There really was no ending. The book ends with a lot of loose ends. Actually, every end was loose. I think sometimes certain novels can pull this off but in this case it just irritated me.
I think the concept of this fictional story is good but it just wasn’t well executed in this novel. The book has apparently been made into a TV show on the Starz network. I will give the show a shot because I think this story could be developed into something enjoyable.
This Modern Broad’s Final Review:
I’ve already picked next month’s Book Club pick and I am so excited to dig in! It’s over 400 pages so I better get going. What have you guys been reading lately? Drop me a line in the comments and let me know!
