The Art of Salvage - Leona Briers

Many aspects of this novel are ones that I typically find interesting. Teenage unwed girl gets pregnant and decides to give the baby up for adoption. As the time of the birth nears, however, she finds the decision a difficult one to make. So, she has the baby girl, who is raised by the mother's parents - and the real mother poses as the girl's sister until quite late in the life. The mother exhibits many signs of mental illness and is either incapable or unwilling to show much affection for her daughter. As the daughter grows up, she is obsessed with finding her father, despite learning that her father died before she was born. She too suffers from bouts of depression, and resorts to cutting to relieve her stress. The story is told in four parts, alternating in focus on the mother and the daughter. Despite liking the basic formula of the story, I found the writing distracting. Briers would tell a straight-forward and interesting story for 30-40 pages, and then it would flashback to something that happened years before or something that never happened at all, and I would find myself daydreaming and having to go back and reread everything all over again. Something about the writing just could not maintain my attention. I've read some glowing reviews of this book on the web, but I just think these subject matters have been dealt with in so many better ways by other authors