5/10
Another low scorer this week; hopefully after the holiday I can update with some more uplifting reviews. In the meantime, let’s talk about City Mouse, shall we? And no, I don’t mean the YA series about a literal mouse that lives in a city, we’ll save that for another time. This City Mouse follows the New York City-loving young mom Jessica as she and her family are uprooted from the city that she loves into the suburbs (horror of horrors). From the way Jessica carries on you’d think that she was also having to move to a new country, learn a new language, and assimilate to a new culture, but I guess moving an hour away from New York is hard too.
Really, that’s where my issue with this book stems from: the central conflict is just not all that interesting. The other problem was that the author couldn’t seem to decide what genre she wanted to be writing, as the story drunkenly weaved back and forth between a cool, modern, female-empowerment novel and the cheesiest, sappiest romantic mom drama. What are you, City Mouse? What did you want to be?
The writing was only so-so; nothing stuck out to me as particularly awful, but it wasn’t anything special either. The characters were over-the-top, although it was essential to the story that they would be so it didn’t bug me as much as it usually would. As for the ending, it is perhaps the strongest part of the novel since (spoiler ahead) the city mouse finally gets to return to the city and she lives happily-ever-after.
I’ve seen this book compared to Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty (which I hopefully will review someday soon!), and I really don’t think that’s fair to either author. While both have to do with some over-the-top moms, Big Little Lies leans more towards being a mystery/thriller for moms than City Mouse’s inclination toward comedy and drama.
No movie to talk about for this one, either, but here’s a gif Stuart Little, yet another kind of city mouse:
Happy Reading Everyone!
