I'm wavering between a 3 and 5 on this one, to be honest, so I went with 4. This book is a very good example of a summer read, something to make people ponder about family and love and obligation and so on while on summer vacation. It's an interesting book, and it's a well-written book. It just depressed me no end. There's a way literature has of making the events of life seem tawdry and gilt-covered, cutting the emotional weight out from underneath and making everything tired, so that we watch the characters betray and hurt one another with a sort of jaded helplessness. Certainly, the sense of tiredness and too-bright gilt, pretending and posturing, is something that is ever-present in the book itself, so the book conveys that. In the end, if you enjoy Jodi Picoult or other summer reads, I think I would recommend this to you. However, if you get into it and you're feeling sort of depressed and tired, I would say it's probably not going to pick up for you.