The Readers' Court: People vs Hello Beautiful

Case #121 is now in session

Judge: In the matter of The People vs Hello Beautiful, wherein The Reader’s Court is determining whether this is a great book or whether it’s overrated, please proceed with your opening arguments.

Prosecutor: Your Honor, while the people are prepared to generously recognize Hello Beautiful as a good novel about four sisters and the family that grows around them, we believe the reputation of its extraordinary brilliance as seen through its breathlessly positive reviews is unwarranted and may cause undue harm and cognitive whiplash to readers who read it under this good-faith assumption.

Defense: Your Honor, the novel and its author are obviously not responsible for its reception once released into the world, nor for whatever overly laudatory and performatively multisyllabic praise Oprah et al may choose to heap on it. However, we have an entire novel’s worth of textual evidence as proof that Hello Beautiful is a substantive, poignant story with skill in freshly approaching some well-trodden topics.

Prosecutor: Certainly the people will concede that the author’s depiction of profound depression is unusually empathetic and honest, neither excusing behaviors nor vilifying the subject. It’s well done.

That said, does it bother no one that the characterizations, especially in the first half of the book, feel much more 50’s/60’s than 1980s? Were we truly all getting engaged during college during the 1980s? Were we so scandalized by unwed mothers? Where was the presence of any modern culture that should have been more influential to the main characters and their situations, including this depression? The people submit that this was distractingly anachronistic.

Defense: The prosecution is not wrong on this note but the defense contends that the core heart of the novel - the true expression of love within the sisters’ unit that supersedes all others; the importance that siblings can have in both filling the holes left by the parents but reinforcing the family dysfunction; and the symbiotic ways that generations can repeat their own traumas even while trying to undo them - is powerful, timeless, and emotional.

In fact, the defense calls as a witness - the prosecution, who was weeping copiously through the final chapters!

Prosecution: Yes, yes, the book was moving. A tearjerker, in fact! IF also prone to the clunky “telling” and not “showing” of key plot points and major time jumps. Let’s not skip over that, shall we?

Further, eliciting an emotional reaction doesn’t mean it’s profound or remarkably unusual. Does this fall into The Dutch House category, one of many entries in the “literary mass fiction” that is both pleasurable and skillful in the moment but will quickly fade from memory and one will never think to recommend it?

Defense: (witheringly) What is a profound book, anyway? Further, must all books be profound or existentially memorable to be recommended? I think not! Is it not enough, in fact, to share that a reading experience was enjoyable, affecting and cathartic in the moment and let others make their own decisions? Must everything stand some arbitrary test of time?

Prosecution: (increasingly exasperatedly) But should we not have some standards for our recommendations and cultural plaudits, and ensure that the discussion can be clear-eyed in critiquing obvious weaknesses, even if acknowledging the overall experience as pleasurable? If not, where does it even end in our commendation of media? Are we just supposed to be okay with the Mission Impossible series and its endless promotional tour even though Tom Cruise is the de facto leader of a cult and no one seems to ever mention it anymore? Please the court, does anything go nowadays?!?

Defense: (explosively) Objection! What does this even have to do with the case at hand? Why must the prosecution insist on expressing absolutely everything that comes into her head! And, the Mission Impossible movies are very entertaining, dammit!

Judge: bangs gavel as heretofore unmentioned audience murmurs and hubbubs Order! Order! Please, keep to the novel for closing arguments.

Prosecution: In summary, the people argue that Hello Beautiful is a well-written, engaging novel, yes, but one that also has some challenges with voice, structure, and uniqueness that ought not to be underplayed.

Defense: Let those novels amongst us without fault cast the first stone! Hello Beautiful never purports perfection, but instead tries to movingly explore what true love and true sacrifice can look like in its many different forms. Is that not a worthy endeavor?

Judge: The court rules … you’re both right! Hello Beautiful may not find a timeless foothold in the “books you must read” canon, but it is a solid reading experience with a lot to say about families and mental health. The Court awards three emotional lambies and rules that the audience can make their choices from here, case adjourned.

In the matter of Hello Beautiful, what say YOU, dear readers?

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Final Matters of the Readers’ Court

• If Hello Beautiful doesn’t bang your reading gavel, remember you can always check the archive for past recommendations!

• This week’s links got to The Ivy bookstore in Baltimore, MD, which looks charming, and which was enthusiastically recommended by reader Jessica G! Thanks, Jessica! And don’t forget to a/shop at indie bookstores, b/submit your fave indie bookstore for inclusion in a future newsletter, and c/floss. If you can. Even though flossing is tedious.

• Miss me a little next week when I won’t be writing a newsletter? Because I’ll be at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference pretending that I love all the books about the crumbling of democracy and certainly never read mysteries or romcoms! (JK, talk about a fiction that would never hold up, yikes.) But yay for books and writers and the events that bring them together, though, you know? I’ll be posting about it real time on my IG which is @kerrykb bc even though I tried to keep up a book specific IG account it felt too inauthentic and too much work and just - I gotta be me. Truly, my account is 90% books/5% other people’s pets/3% voting memes/2% Angel City Football Club, so - not much different than this newsletter!

• If you like this newsletter, I’m always grateful if you would heart, comment or share it so that our little community can grow and so that I can cling to the secret absurd hope that even if I age out of my chosen career in the next four weeks, I can have a future in book recommendationing! Merci and thank you.