Southern Fried Sushi (Southern Fried Sushi, #1)

by Jennifer Rogers Spinola

[ladygrey]

I wanted to read more contemporary books and I want to like the books I read and when I don't I sometimes feel that I'm being overly critical and mean. Which is the case with this book. And I don't enjoy that.

Here's the thing. This isn't actually an awful book. It's just I didn't like the main character at all and sometimes wanted to throw my kindle into the seat in front if me on the airplane. Hard. She was obtuse. And judgmental. And irrational sometimes. And one dimensional in the way that she made blind assumptions and reacted to them with such ferocity it just made me want to call her really, really dumb - but not in an unintelligent way, except sometimes in a naive, ignorant way. And a little bit if a bigot against Southerners. About 20% of the way through I almost put it down.

The reason I didn't is that the other characters are really kind and likable. I think [a:Jennifer Rogers Spinola|4747995|Jennifer Rogers Spinola|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1317946121p2/4747995.jpg] made Shiloh so horrible to drive the plot and to present certain things about faith. And I don't mind, entirely, when a main character does something dumb. Especially, as is this case in this story, when it's quickly contradicted or someone points out how dumb it is. But in order for that to work it needs to be an occasional dumb thing and not the entire book. And the character has to be likable overall and Shiloh wasn't for me. Adam and Becky and Faye and Jerry and Stella and Tim and pretty much everyone else were fine which is how I made it to the end.

And it's a little preachy in the second half when Shiloh starts exploring her faith - it's like that's all anyone talks about the rest of the book and I get it's the key thing for Shiloh at the moment and also the point of the book but it still feels too consuming. The upside is I agreed with her theology so even though it was a bit too much it wasn't awful.

The cultures on each side are well described and the second half of the book manages to feel worlds away from the first half. At first writing the Southern dialog phonetically made me roll my eyes. Well, really writing the Australian dialog phonetically made me roll my eyes. By the time we got to the Southerners it was tolerable. And sometimes Shiloh's cultureal ignorance was just ridiculous. I get she wasn't familiar with the South but there were times it was like she'd grown up in Japan instead of just living there the past... four or five years. And that's the other thing about her childhood. When Spinola gave her a bad childhood she literally threw in every awful thing that could possibly happen and it comes out as a list of atrocities in one paragraph making it seem more contrived and trite than authentic damage. I rolled my eyes there too.

So I went back and forth between one and two stars and finally decided very likable secondary characters and decent theology was worth a second star.