Why did someone adapt this from the original, set in England, to another version set in the United States? I wish I could have read the original, but it was not available at my library and I didn’t realize this is a different version. The adaptation was quite clumsy, they did not adopt US colloquialisms, using “phone” as the verb for “call” and “perhaps” instead of “maybe,” as two examples. It was like a bad American English translation of a British English book. And, the idea of a babysitter‘s club for adults is something I have never heard of here. Also, Dearborn is not so close to Chicago as the book implies, and when you’re from the Great Lakes region you refer to the water as “The Lake,” not “seaside” or whatever terms they used here.

So this aspect of this version of the book was frustrating, and there were a lot of other parts I didn’t like as well.

Those are: the characterization was very weak, too many characters, not enough distinguishing characteristics, not enough visual description to be able to see them and differentiate them as characters in your head. None of the relationships felt authentic. Not one.

Racism was a minor subplot, but very sporadically, and its execution felt ham-handed and incomplete. Tension-building also felt haphazard and incomplete.

I was intrigued by the outline of this story and see how it could make a terrific movie, but all of the flaws mentioned above would need to be addressed.

This could end up being the rare instance where the movie version of a story is better than the book version. I like this author, but this was not the book.