A review by tacoshark
The Celebrants by Steven Rowley

emotional hopeful sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

I wanted to love this but I couldn’t quite get there. I enjoyed it and there were aspects that really worked well - but I found it a bit hard to buy these friendships, especially when they apparently went twenty years never or barely talking to each other. The set pieces worked, but the characters didn’t feel fully fleshed out to me - I think this book wanted another 100 pages to really fill in the spaces. 

(Also I kept getting irrationally hung up on the extremely bad writing that was the repeated tagline: “leave nothing left unsaid.” Just say leave nothing unsaid! It’s so tortured! The first time I read it, I got hung up on it for five minutes and couldn’t get past it and then it came back like four more times. Terrible terrible writing.)
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