annalew's review against another edition
3.0
I wanted to love this book. I really did. I'm a sucker for a reunion story and this is a reunion story for the most part. A bunch of characters who went to college together reunite at a wedding and what happens at the wedding sets off a chain of events that leads them to France to look for a necklace. But this just didn't gel together for me. I didn't understand what was motivating the character of Victor to do what he was doing. There were a bunch of minor characters from college and I couldn't figure out why they existed at all. It was very well written and enjoyable enough that I wanted to keep going and find out how it ended but I didn't love it.
nicki_j's review against another edition
3.0
Underwhelming. I did not feel invested in the minor mystery or the characters, which were more like caricatures until the last few chapters. 2.75 stars.
meredithw20's review against another edition
4.0
This was my first experience with Sloane Crosley, though I reserved her memoir at the library before I reserved The Clasp... but I guess the length of those respective lines is telling? I dunno. I liked this book, despite stated objections to many of its elements in the abstract -- like I sort of roll my eyes when a work of modern fiction is presided over by the characters' obsession/intersection with a classic author, the way Whitman holds court in Paper Towns, but for whatever reason the Maupassant thing read as charming. I don't like stories where men have conflicting attractions to one woman (and I guess that's still true of The Clasp, because I didn't dig the way this ends). I am really done with mopey techie boys as book characters, but I followed Victor across the ocean. I was compelled to read this pretty quickly, despite a relatively low-stakes plot and characters I found irritating, I guess because their motivations had such a strange twist in application? Or because I liked the language so much? God, I have never written this long a Goodreads review. tl;dr: I don't know why I liked this book so much. Maybe you can tell me.
mary_clark's review against another edition
1.0
I wanted to like this book, but I'm not a fan of dialect. In this case, upper-class millennial dialect that prevented me from liking or caring about what happened to any of the characters.
aobrien23's review against another edition
3.0
I adore Sloane Crosley's non-fiction (and I might slightly want to be her), but this didn't have the same verve.
jaclynday's review against another edition
2.0
I should have known this book would be insufferable when I saw it reviewed in every glossy magazine I picked up, and even then—even then!—I still read it. It’s ploddingly, horrifically slow, with characters that seem straight out of Instagram imaginings. All the humor and life is methodically sucked out of the story as Crosley continually strives to slam literary weight into a book that ultimately has nothing much to say.
eric_roling's review against another edition
2.0
This wanted to be literary fiction playing off Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace", but the author bit off more than she could chew. Unlikeable characters go where ever the author needs them to go. Two characters come together for no discernable reason (other than lots of alcohol - maybe the author thought that was reason enough). Some interesting scenery and locations, but overall not a very compelling story.
shogins's review against another edition
2.0
It was more interesting when I thought the necklace was real. And I didn't care about any of the characters, although I totally would've read a Devil Wears Prada-esque story about Kezia and the jewelry industry.
mehrangezmr's review against another edition
3.0
This was well written but i thought it went a little off the rails in the final chapters which take place in France. Really felt rather far fetched and as though I was reading a different book, one that was more melodramatic and picaresque. I did think the relationships between Kezia, Nathaniel and Victor ended up taking a poignant turn but it took too long I felt for them to actually get there.