by Ann Napolitano ★★★★☆
As a fan of author Napolitano's previous novel, Dear Edward, I was excited to see what she'd come up with as a follow-up. Add on the extra buzz with Oprah selecting Hello Beautiful as her 100th "Oprah's Book Club" selection, and my expectations were pretty high for this one.
The novel opens with the childhood of one of the main characters, William Waters. William grows up in a household characterized by an early tragedy, and with parents who seem indifferent to his existence, William instead turns to basketball. His love of the game and above average skill ultimately lead him to Northwestern to play basketball for the Wildcats. While at school, William meets fellow student Julia Padavano, and soon after William meets her three sisters as well.
While William is a central character, the Padavano sisters are at the heart of the novel, which traces their very different personalities and evolution from girls into women. The novel spans almost 50 years, and you get to live through the challenges for each of the sisters, although oldest sister Julia and her next oldest Sylvie are the focus. Chapters are told from the point of view of either William, Julia, or Sylvie (with a couple of exceptions), and so it's with those that the reader develops the deepest understanding and closest bond.
Press and reviews regularly refer to Hello Beautiful as "an homage to Little Women", and while there are references to Little Women sprinkled throughout the novel -- the sisters are all big fans and debate which character each corresponds to -- the similarities are generally quite limited. Outside of the macro commonality of the four main characters being sisters and the novel tracing their path as they grow from girls into women, common plot points are few. Put another way, if I wasn't told it was an homage to Little Women, I would not have jumped to that conclusion, and so if you're a big fan of the Alcott novel and expecting a modern retelling akin to something like what Barbara Kingsolver did last year with Demon Copperhead / David Copperfield, reset expectations.
As she did in Dear Edward, Napolitano does a fine job writing characters that resonate. Like that previous novel, she also seems to have a penchant for her characters finding bits of happiness amidst some trying tragedies, so be prepared for plenty of ups and downs (and, perhaps, more downs than ups). One of the challenges for me was that I just couldn't find a way to like Julia, to the point I was more often rooting against her than for her. It makes her a dynamic main character -- it might just be me, but I suspect other readers will find her harder to like -- but it also presents a challenge when every third chapter is hers, and ideally I'd like to spend time with the other characters instead.
It's clearly a well-written novel, and as a Chicago resident for almost 17 years, it was fun to read a book that took place primarily in the neighborhood of Pilsen with occasional jaunts to Evanston. There are some lovely portions of the book that I will remember, and I thought that it was strongest in its final 100 pages. But despite that, there were also enough average sections that it falls short of a 5-star book for me.