Title: The Bette Davis Club
Author: Jane Lotter
Publication date: 2015
My Grade: B
My Review:
This is a story about Margo. It starts off with Margo at her niece’s wedding when the bride takes off and Margo’s sister hires her to chase after her niece. She is accompanied by the groom, Tully, and the two end up going on a road trip across the US in pursuit, driving an 1955 sports car.
I actually enjoyed this book. It plays around with cliches, and Margo’s almost always wrong in her assumptions. She runs into a few interesting characters. She also spends most of the ride reevaluating what she knows about her past, although the ‘flashback’ chapters come later then one would expect, and don’t tend to go into quite enough detail.
There are a few romances in the story, although the main one seems to happen without any lead up. There are period mentions of how cute the guy is, but that is it till the end of the book. Georgia’s story is confused as well.
Its a good read for a lazy afternoon, though.
There is a bittersweet element to this story. Ms. Lotter was a professonal writer, writing columns in Seattle Newspapers but this is her one and only novel, which was self-published shortly before her death. After she died, her family was contacted by a publishing house which published the version I read. The daughter wrote a forward to the book.
