Melissa DePino

This is a Mom’s Book Nook Book of the month. It is the story of three families that tear down their walls literally and combine their three individual homes into a single large home. My best friend lives 3 houses down from me and we do lots of stuff including holidays together, but sharing a kitchen and living rooms sounds like the end of our friendship to me.
The wives are for, 2 of the 3 husbands are ok with the idea. The hold out changes his mind when he had a medical scare and the crazy commune idea begins. It went about like how I expected, drama and weirdness, and not really working out. But only one family was broken up, and that break up really had nothing to do with the commune. I liked the writing, it was easy and light and the story moves at a good pace. It felt predictable, but that is ok. Sometimes it's nice to have a fun light book to read.

For additional reviews please see my blog at www.adventuresofabibliophile.blogspot.com… (mais)

I thought the idea within this book was interesting. After a disastrous water leak ruins the walls between two row houses, a group of neighbors (who are also close friends) decide to tear down the first floor walls between their homes and live together. They shared responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing. This was not as if they were simply roommates. It was as if they were a giant family.

Throughout the book I desperately wanted to reach inside the pages and strangle the characters until they came to their senses. Except perhaps Celia. I don’t remember being too upset with her; but the rest of the lot, gosh! If only they had communicated – but I will get to that in a second. There are a lot of times when boundaries are crossed and the lines get blurred in this book. There are emotional affairs, physical affairs, and something else I can’t even explain because I’m not even sure what exactly was going on. I’m still confused by it. Honestly, I was surprised these couples agreed to tear down the first floor walls. In the first chapters, it didn’t seem like they liked each other all that much.

Some of the things about communal living seemed beneficial. Kids to play with other kids. Shared cooking and cleaning responsibilities. Someone always around to help out with something, or just simply to hang out. I think it could work with the right people. But it seems these couples just had too many issues in and among the group to make it work.

I think the character development fell flat. I hardly knew anything about them or how they came to be married to their spouse. In order to have been more invested in the characters, I needed to know more about them. Maybe the authors felt there wasn’t enough space to include this, because there are 7 main characters that get focused on. That’s a lot of characters to keep straight. Admittedly, I wrote down the couples’ names and who their spouse was in order to keep it all straight. Anyways, it was lacking.

This book did teach me an awful lot about marriage. It made it clear that open honest conversation (and lots of it!) is extremely important for a healthy, happy, satisfied marriage. If these couples had stopped to communicate honestly with their significant other, and listened to their partner, they all could have saved themselves a lot of stress and heartache.

“This was what their life was like now. Entire days and nights passed without their even knowing what had filled the other’s time.”

The ending left me with so many questions and so many things unresolved. I’ll just have to make my own conclusions as to what I think happened. I just wish there had been more closure.

I received an eARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Review originally posted on Books For The Living.… (mais)