The Violets of March

The Violets of March

By Sarah Jio (293 pages)
Published by Plume
Bookish rating: 2.75

“Mom, you know that book that’s set in Seattle that I thought you might like and that you picked for the book club and that you bought and that you read super fast because that’s how you roll and that you let me borrow so I didn’t have to actually buy it?”

“Yes,” Mums said, not pointing out my run-on sentence.

“I’m almost done. I don’t think I like it.”

“Yeah. It’s sort of  . . .  Lifetime Movie of the Week-ish,” Mums said.

“Totes. And generic. And uninspired. And predictable.”

“You said you hadn’t finished it yet.”

“I haven’t. But I’m predicting what will happen.” (It did.)

So, that was a first. I don’t think Mums and I have ever agreed upon books. Sure, we generally agreed that The House on Oyster Creek was pretty good, and I will die with the contentment of my mom calling me in college, shouting into the phone, “HOLY [NAUGHTY WORD], Rochester is MARRIED?!” when she decided to take a little foray into Victorian gothic literature. But in general? We have very different bookish tastes. And I can’t really recall both of us going “eh” together over a book.

Considering that my mother and I have practically nothing in common except brown eyes,  a propensity for overreaction, and unfathomable adoration for Charlotte (third-generation brown eyes, by the way), our mutual “eh” was quite the mother–daughter moment.

So, I guess that Violets of March gets a point for that. It gets another point for being set in the lovely Pacific Northwest, on Bainbridge Island. And let’s face it, the cover is purdy.

The premise? Emily—a bestselling author (riiiiiiight) gets screwed over in love in NYC so leaves the mean East Coast for the friendly, fleece-wearers of the Seattle area. She stays with her aunt on Bainbridge Island (oh, to be able to waste a whole month doing nada because some you hit a bump in the road of romance), and uncovers an old diary from the 1940s. It turns out Emily is sort of connected to the people in the diary, and so she puts in a couple hours of sleuthing to give herself some sort of semblance of productivity, I guess.

The writing was bland and generic, the dialogue flat (do you know how many phone conversations we have to read of “Hello?” “Hi.” “It’s Emily.” “Oh, hi, Emily.” “How are you?” “I’m fine.” REPEATEDLY. I mean, that’s just shit dialogue right there.)

The diary aspect fails, as it’s written in the same personality-devoid voice as Emily’s uninspired voice.

I was really expecting this book to be so much better than it was, but instead we got an artless piece of plotting. Everything seemed forced. Kind of amateurish. I love the idea of a literary fiction novel taking place on Bainbridge, especially in that most temperamental month of March, and the whole effort just fell so flat.