The Keeper of Happy Endings

 

The Keeper of Happy Endings – by Barbara Davis

A Kindle Unlimited (i.e. free) deal that I tried because it received an awful lot of high ratings. In summary, this book was a tad too “chick flick-ish” for me.  I know, I know – it’s not a movie, it’s a book. But I think you know what I mean. This is a book written by a woman mainly for women readers. I hesitate saying that as such a statement can get one in a lot of trouble in today’s climate of political correct-ness and not stereotyping the genders. But I stand by my assessment.

The story starts in the mid 1980s. We meet a 20-ish single woman named Rory whose life has already had some nasty turns. Rory is a “privileged” child who is constantly fighting and arguing with her “privileged” mother, Camilla. Camilla has gobs of money and prestige, and for her, life is never about doing what you want, but rather doing things that other wealthy people will be impressed by; no matter how miserable it might make you. So as far as Rory’s future goes, she definitely has different ideas and plans that what her mother wishes.

Without going into too much detail, our story allows Rory to meet an older woman named Soline. This book is equally about Soline as it is about Rory. Soline was Rory’s age during World War II, and was a native of France when the Nazi’s invaded in 1940. We go back in this book plenty of times to that tumultuous time in 1940, and read about Soline’s life, and how hard it was for a young single woman to survive during the Nazi occupation. So all of these years later, these two women develop a bond that neither of them quite understand, but seem to welcome.

Well, there’s a lot more to the plot, but I won’t go into it here. I will say that whereas I enjoyed the book overall, it was a tad too “descriptive” for me. By “descriptive”, I’m not referring to unpleasant things, but the tendency of the author to go into far too much detail when the women are doing something as arbitrary as trying on clothes. Again, maybe women enjoy reading about such things.  There’s a lot of trauma, secrets, and history going on here, and whereas such elements can be welcome in a story, everything here seemed to be a tad forced.  Too many things happen that are coincidental and contrived, and characters seem to radically change within the literal turn of a page.  At times I felt like, had the people in this story knew that they were fictional characters, they would have gotten mad at the author for pulling them kicking and screaming towards a happy ending.

The book was well written, and I suppose that there probably is a large body of readers who would enjoy a story like this far better than I would, so I can’t fault the author in that aspect. I honestly wish, though, that there had been a bit more imagination written into the story – especially during the last 75 pages or so when the author was trying to hard to wrap everything in a nice pretty package.  A keeper of a happy ending indeed.