I fully expected to fall in love with The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett. In fact, I’m shocked by my “Not My Cuppa” rating. With the cover, title, and concept, I thought it would be like reading one of my favorite genre of movies, quirky indie flix (largely from the early 2000s) with a killer (chill) soundtrack and a heartfelt, struggle-bus, slice-of-life story. Think Garden State, Ghost World, About Schmidt, Juno, Peanut Butter Falcon, Lars and the Real Girl, or more apt for this comparison, Little Miss Sunshine. I think it likely that I would enjoy this book better as a movie. I found it to be fine, but also a bit obvious and trying too hard for its quirk.

Blurb: PJ Halliday, lottery winner and hoarder, lives down the street from his ex-wife and her boyfriend and can’t handle bad news. He also just became the proud guardian of two traumatized children he didn’t know existed until today and a very insightful (and predictive) cat. But he’s not going to let that stop him from an off-the-rails road trip across the country with his embittered daughter to ask an old flame and brand-new widow to marry him.

The thing is, the more I read lately, the less I enjoy popular/book club fiction and the more I gravitate toward either end of the spectrum of literary on one end and genre (for me, fantasy, YA, or romance, mostly) on the other. I think it’s only fair that I mention, and early, that Tender Hearts has a whopping 4.31 rating on Goodreads. With almost 200,000 ratings! And while popular/book club reads tend to fare better than literary (or nonfiction, but that’s another story), that’s a pretty amazing track record so far. I am going to be leading discussion tomorrow evening on this book, and I expect that while I’m a little nervous I brought this one to club, it’s probable that most people will have liked it. (I might let you know later.)

Not that I hated it. I almost enjoyed it. But I found it much easier to put down and much harder to pick back up than I would expect for a straight-forward book like this. I even thought for a while that I was really liking it, what with its smattering of magical realism and its dark side. But then I realized I wasn’t drawn back to it even after I settled in and… I had to think twice about it. I liked the idea of this book better than the experience of reading it. And despite its supposed humor (and just coming off of Big Swiss, which was naughty but lol-funny), I didn’t find myself snickering or chuckling or anything.

I tire of bland writing styles. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but it’s actually looking like this is a trend of some sort, and it is not my jam nor my cup of tea. I like words to do exciting things. I like scenes to grip me by the throat and pull me into them. Florid? Descriptive? Poetic. Yes, please. Sparse can be done well, but even Hemingway or George Orwell surrounds me with a place, time, and mood (tone, vibes) and also takes my breath away with the perfection/completeness of the minimalism. (At times. Not all the time. That might be too exciting.) The type of writing I am encountering often lately is more like a sketch or outline or skeleton, in which the reader’s imagination is expected to do most of the work in creating space, fleshing out scenes, even figuring out what characters might look like or where and when in time you are. As for the language of these books, I think it’s meant to stay out of the way and just tell a story, but for me, that’s not only boring but leaves very little to admire. Like I said, not my jam. And not the jam of traditional/historical book people, either.

I would say that Tender Hearts is one of these skeleton books. (That’s what I’m going to call them from now on.) We have a plot. We get told lots of things. We even get a little meat here with some descriptions of places, but descriptions that tend to lack too much emotional attachment, aka vibes. The back seat of a car on a road trip is full of vibes, but on the way to Tender Hearts Retirement Community, the vibes are provided by the reader, who has had experiences like this, but by an author with their arm around our shoulders escorting us to a whole new world (or a familiar one seen through someone else’s eyes). Does this make sense? (Somewhat telling and not showing.)

Which meant that while other readers were moved by this story—they cried, they laughed, whatever—I was going, “Huh. Pretty cute story. That’s a funny idea. Look, squirrel!” And the book was on the bedside table again.

I also was uncomfortable with the approach to the (main) theme of alcoholism. There were some pluses there, but then some aspects that left me… mildly alarmed? Squirming? I couldn’t tell you exactly what I mean, but as someone who has quite a bit of life experience with alcoholics, I was unhappy in a number of the scenes with ol’ PJ and his journey.

I guess when it’s all said and done, it was the flow of this book that didn’t work for me. It was clunky, I thought. Because of everything I said above, but also because of the pacing and the cramming in of so much tragedy and so many (big) themes/subplots. I can’t find another review with the same issues as mine, so maybe I’m being super weird with this one. The point is that Tender Hearts has all the ingredients for me to love it, but I was increasingly disinterested and unengaged. It’s a trend for me and books with similar writing styles and approaches to storytelling.

Even so, I’m not going to not recommend it. Most of you will probably enjoy it (if you like this type of book). So knock yourself out. I’ll hope for a movie instead.