Kendra's Reviews > Hello Beautiful

This is a novel about family and emotions, and what happens when people suppress their emotions or don't know how to deal with their emotions. Most of characters in this novel having big emotions, but they're conveyed to the reader in such a way as to be very flat, very placid. There's never a sense of urgency--not even when William goes missing, not even when he and Sylvia come clean to her sisters. It's just "They were upset but then they weren't." or "She was angry but made herself be calm and got on with her life." It's all just very smooth: things happen, the author tells us how they react, another thing happens. Even when there's character interiority, it's all on one very flat, very even reportage-style presentation. And so the characters lack a lot of depth. The setting is the same: Pilsen is a vibrant, interesting place in Chicago to have the characters live, but aside from the murals, there is absolutely no sense of place or what the neighborhood is really like. Again, it's flattened out into a kind of nothingness. This was a disappointment.