Holly Banks Full Of Angst by Julie Valerie

Basically this is supposed to be the tale of one woman's attempts to get her life on track.  Things are stressful right ow - just moved house to a completely new area, daughter is about to start school for the first time, husband is in a new job that is swallowing all his time and the parental unit is a liability.  You can see why Holly Banks is full of angst can't you - so much happening in such a small time frame.  Even worse the Village Of Primm is one of those picture perfect American villages and seems to have an overdeveloped sense of worth - in fact, it sounds like a downright scary place to live with it's enclaves and F. U. Frisbee tournaments and all that topiary is far too Overlook Hotel for me.

The biggest issue I have is with the characters in this book, to the last one they are deeply unpleasant.  We only really get to know Holly and that is only because she is our narrator.  Initially I felt a little bit of sympathy for her, moving to her ideal home a week before her daughter starts school for the first time could only be a recipe for stress but by the time we got to the end of the protracted Real Estate Agent doorstep scene I was done.  Holly's internal monologue is supposed to reflect her desires to return to the filmmaking she studied at College, what it actually does is show that she is not a particularly "nice" person.  She is incapable of seeing another's point of view and sees their actions only in terms of their direct impingement on her; to be honest I'd love to give a psychiatrist a copy of this and ask them to diagnose Holly Banks and I fear angst would be the least of her worries once they were done.

The only member of the supporting cast that I could get behind even a little bit was Greta, Holly's mother.  Yes she is overdone as an alcoholic gambling addict that follows one scatty scheme after another - Cat Doula anyone?  However, she is the only character that has any facets to her character and actually comes across on the page as a person.  Sadly, it take a looong time for her to turn up as more than an aside and by the time she does you are way past caring about what is happening with Holly or in the wider, weird world of Primm.

I can see that this is supposed to be a satire, I even noticed tiny sections that got it tonally right.  However, on the whole, this book is a gigantic swing and a miss.  It rapidly becomes a parody of itself rather than the world that it is hoping to lampoon.  There seem to be certain things that the author has a major issue with and so spends far too long setting the scenes up and drawing the outcome out, this just leads to reader disinterest rather than illuminating the ridiculousness of real world behaviour.  In all honesty, my recommendation is to give this one a body swerve - pretend it is Mary-Margaret St. James and her sign up papers for the PTA and do that commando crawl from the hall (one of the few scenes that got the balance right).