Kat with a K

Review: Not My Daughter

Okay. Catching up on book reviews. Seriously.

Not My Daughter by Barbara Delinsky
Genre: Women's fiction
Pages: 343
Rating: 5

A group of best friends in a small town in Maine (? I think? The company they work for is obviously based on L.L. Bean so I assumed Maine, but it could have been Massachusetts) find out that several of their teen daughters are pregnant, presumably in some sort of pregnancy pact, and they all have to deal with that, and blah blah. The main character is the principal of the high school, so everyone blames her for the whole thing, because she had her daughter when she was a teenager. Never mind that that was an unplanned pregnancy and the pact pregnancies are all planned. Or so they claim. So the families and various groups of friends all have to deal with this, and there are of course baby health scares that bring everyone together, and - look, I'm not even going to bother. You know how this is going to go, and no, it doesn't really make a whole lot more sense than I'm making it sound like.

Okay, I have to be honest here: I didn't expect this to be any good, going into it. And I was . . . not disappointed? Yeah. It was exactly as bad as I'd expected. The characters were pretty flat, the plot didn't make much sense, and no one's motives were ever sufficiently explained. The one bright spot was the hand-dyed yarn company that the main characters run, and, in general, all the knitting that the characters did. Delinsky certainly knew what she was talking about there, and I think this would actually have been better as a "group of disparate friends brought together by knitting" book, without the ripped-from-the-headlines pregnancy pact stuff. Oh well.