I’ve gotten behind on posts again – damn this pesky bookstore! – but I am determined to catch up. The obvious solution is to write shorter posts. This doesn’t come naturally to me, but I’m gonna try.
The World After Alice by Lauren Aliza Green is a character-driven drama about two families tied together by Alice – who jumped from a bridge her senior year of high school. Twelve years have passed, and her best friend Morgan is engaged to her little brother Benji, a fact they kept secret from their families until just before their wedding. Now the wedding weekend has arrived, and Alice and Benji’s divorced parents and Morgan’s father are all descending on a small Maine town, unearthing a lot of painful memories and raw feelings among the whole group.
Character-driven is an understatement when it comes to The World After Alice. This is an interior novel that probes and tests all of the interpersonal relationships at play here. Sadness imbues the whole novel, as the loss of Alice and the reverberations caused by her death are felt by every character. Long discussions ensue, some more credible than others, as they work out their feelings about each other.
In the end, The World After Alice was too overwrought for me. The writing was very good (although there were several words that I had to look up!) and Green’s eye for detail was exquisite. I just found myself exhausted at times by all the analysis and self-absorption. And there was one key relationship involving Alice that got short shrift, a glaring weakness in a book where so many others were given so much scrutiny.
I felt invested in The World After Alice while I read it, but it was slow and I haven’t thought much about it since I finished it.
OK how was that for short?