I did not love it.
It's ostensibly about 5 lonely/disconnected people who find themselves together in a house in Scotland for the Christmas holidays.
While it would be fine as a character-study, I didn't find any of the characters particularly enthralling.
We are supposed to love them all because... well because they are the characters in the book. There's a lot of "telling, not showing," and so I can't really say we get to know any of them well. Carries is beautiful, but stoic. Elfrida is eccentric and marches to her own beat. Oscar is... I don't know. An organist who... Sam... something, something... The most sketched out character is 14-year-old Lucy, but only because we get to read her diary. It is there that she comes alive. She is a typical teenager trying to make sense of the world the adults have given her. She is both sweet and self-absorbed. Apparently we are supposed to love them all and see them as the family we wish we could choose.
The problem is that I didn't love any of them. Even Lucy was hard to stomach at times. Carrie decides to rescue her from her very selfish grandmother and mother, whom we are clearly supposed to reject, yet their selfishness doesn't look that different from that of the others. Oscar and Sam are sympathetic, but we don't really get to know them, so... Also it's clear we are not supposed to like judgmental, religious people. Oh yeah, and that adultery is good when one of ours does it; bad when it's done to one of ours...
While we are supposed to cheer on the formation of a chosen family by these lonely, misunderstood outcasts, I honestly didn't care by the end.
It's nice that Oscar returns to church in the end, I suppose, but the why and the how and the "therefore, what..." are completely truncated. And so the ending is also unsatisfying.
Maybe I'm being overly harsh and the adultery stuff was too much. I don't know. I just know I didn't respond the way GoodReads says I was supposed to.
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