About the Book- Prom Mom
New York Times bestseller Laura Lippman tells the story of Amber Glass, desperately trying to get away from her tabloid past but compulsively drawn back to the city of her youth and the prom date who destroyed everything she was reaching for.
Amber Glass has spent her entire adult life putting as much distance as possible between her and her hometown of Baltimore, where she fears she will forever be known as “Prom Mom”–the girl who allegedly killed her baby on the night of the prom after her date, Joe Simpson, abandoned her to pursue the girl he really liked. But when circumstances bring Amber back to the city, she realizes she can have a second chance–as long as she stays away from Joe, now a successful commercial real estate developer, married to a plastic surgeon, Meredith, to whom he is devoted.
The problem is, Amber can’t stay away from Joe. And Joe finds that it’s increasingly hard for him to ignore Amber, if only because she remembers the boy he was and the man he said he was going to be. Against the surreal backdrop of 2020 and early 2021, the two are slowly drawn to each other and eventually cross the line they’ve been trying not to cross.
“Too many people got distracted by one-upmanship, the urge to be the alpha in any encounter, social or business. Joe wanted only to get out with what he wanted.”
Read on for our review of Prom Mom by Laura Lippman
Our Review of Prom Mom by Laura Lippman
Weirdly, I picked up this book after recently having heard about the real-life case of a 16-year-old giving birth and allegedly killing the newborn baby in a hospital bathroom. I had just listened to the whole case on a podcast and then by sheer coincidence I picked up this book without knowing much about what the book is all about. As I get into the book, I can’t help but feel perhaps this was a loosely inspired fiction of this case or maybe something similar. Because technically the idea is all there but the execution is lacking.
The book takes you right in the middle of the action and you anticipate that this is going to go somewhere only to realize that the book is just going in circles and not reaching anywhere. Honestly you lose hope in the book because almost 80% of the book is just going through daily life, character introductions and perhaps a bit into character building. This is all good if you think it will eventually lead to somewhere. Don’t get me wrong the book does finally throw a huge twist but it is way too late by then to salvage the book because you have sat through a lot of information overload that ultimately proves to you of no use.
It’s like it starts with a certain temperament and then switches to something else and then it goes cold all of a sudden. Like an ECG machine at the very end, it gives you a sudden spark. For some, it might be the grace that would make them feel that the book was good but for me, it was just another reason why I felt the book didn’t work. This book would have worked so much as a fine-tuned thriller if it had scrapped all of the middle chapters and combined them into one or three chapters and then showed some actual plot events and developments that could take the readers to that plot twist they had been craving from the beginning.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I would say that this book talks a lot. So much so that it absolutely forgets where it started and the end goal. Well technically the book does reach somewhat to its goal but the amount of fillers and circles it created while reaching this end makes it really exhaustive to appreciate the good aspects. For me, the book was all talk and no action and even the characters made less sense. They would appear as something in one chapter and then something else in the next. so its hard to kind of keep track.
Squirrel Rating
