Head of the Class

The Red Book
Deborah Copaken Kogan
Fiction

I hated this book, but I kept reading it until the very bitter end. There’s a term most TV viewers know called hate watching. This is when you watch a show, but you hate it. I think that term applies to this book. I read it, but I hated it.

I’ll give a quick summary and then jump right into the top five things I hated about The Red Book. For their 25-year reunion at Harvard, four girlfriends reunite with their families and old drama resurfaces.

Thing #1 I hated: Long paragraphs. Oh my god, were the paragraphs long. And the worst part was, some of them weren’t even descriptions. Quite a few were supposed to be dialogue. Nobody can talk that long without taking a break or someone interrupting them. Nobody.

Thing #2 I hated: Breaks. Two people would be having a conversation. Person A would say something or ask a question. Person B would ruminate about something else entirely or remember a certain memory and this would go on for a page or two. Then Person B would finally respond to Person A. What the effing hell? Have you ever been talking to someone, said something, then let the conversation dangle for five minutes while you mused about a completely unrelated topic? Didn’t think so.

Thing #3 I hated: Characters. I did not like one single character in this book. I take that back, I liked some of the kids. But they don’t really count. All of the main adult characters were pretty heinous, or, if I did like them, at some point, I discovered a secret about them that made me hate them.

Thing #4 I hated: Texts. At a critical spot in the book, two characters have an extremely long text conversation (that should’ve been a face-to-face dialogue conversation). Using short-cut slang such as ‘u’ and not capitalizing. Which is fine in real life. In a book, however, it sucks to read. Made my head ache.

Thing #5 I hated: One of the characters dies at the end, and of course, it ended up being the only adult character I didn't want to throw off a bridge. What crap. Total and utter crap.

 Do not read this book, I beg you. It will just make you angry.