which is published monthly and features reviews of new or soon to be published books. That's where I heard about The Bee Sting...frankly, the description both in the publication and on the book sleeve seemed somewhat misleading once I finished the book.
How do you feel about dark comedy in general? Every time I read or watch a dark comedy, there are always lots of people saying things like “I didn’t see anything funny about that at all!” So you are not alone. I also don’t need to have everything tied up neatly at the end. I’m fine with open endings to novels. And I don’t care if everyone gets a happily ever after.
Admittedly it's not my favorite genre but occasionally I will read dark comedy or watch a movie billed as dark comedy (I enjoyed the movie The Menu, for example, and found moments to chuckle during it). And I'm not someone who (always) needs a happy ending or even a complete ending but if the author spends several chapters building up to an ending and then it's all "eh, you can use your imagination to decide how it all turned out!", I get a little annoyed <g>.
LOL, Vicky, thank you for your nonrecommendation! 😸😉❤️
You're welcome! And if you read it, let us know what you thought of it...and then tell me what I was supposed to find "funny". Because I can think of only one, tiny, throwaway bit with a very, very, VERY minor character that made me laugh and that was only because it was one of those "sad but true" things.
ETA that it sounds like maybe the novelist is evoking Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style of writing for the mother’s POV. If so, well, I love Virginia Woolf.
The mother comes from, ah, very humble beginnings. I felt the author's decision to use run-on sentences for her narrative was to reflect on how different her upbringing was from the Barnes family: her husband, the brother she was going to marry and their parents. The father-in-law appears for a good chunk of the book and much is made about his fortune (both the good luck kind and the financial success kind).
