Book Review Thursday - 9/1

I am finally caught up so we are back on schedule with Book Review Thursdays!

True Colors is the second book that I have read by author Kristin Hannah. The book opens the day after the funeral of Winona, Aurora and Vivi Ann’s mother and sets the stage for a distant father and strife among the 3 girls. The family has a long history with the town and the father is only concerned with the family appearing as a strong and united family to the town in spite of the family’s internal struggles and the fight to keep the land that has been in the family for generations.

I haven’t read enough of Hannah’s books to know if the same themes are prevalent in all of them, but just between True Colors and Firefly Lane I can say that strong family ties and undercurrents of jealousy are present in both stories. There is also a great deal of jumping ahead a few years with little mention of what has occurred in the skipped years. I’m not sure if the reader is supposed to understand that the same feelings continue in the skipped years or if nothing of consequence occurred, but it didn’t really affect the story greatly in True Colors.

I did enjoy True Colors more than the other book because in Firefly Lane it seemed that Hannah wanted to make sure the reader knew what year it was in the story or what was happening outside of the lives of the main characters because there was a lot of references to pop culture and items that were fads and fashionable throughout the entire book. It became very cumbersome when I was listening to the audio version. Imagine eye rolls occurring at every reference and sometimes they happened every 2-3 minutes!

But back to True Colors… I did enjoy this book more, but I have to warn those of you who like audio books… I could NOT make it through 45 minutes to an hour of listening to the audio book! The narrator was completely awful! Her voice just grated on my nerves! I tried to listen to this book at least a year ago and I gave up completely because of the narrator. And usually, I can get past a bad narrator with a good book. I ended up manually reading this book, but it was a fairly quick read considering the length. A little predicable, but a nice summer read overall.