Ann Napitaliano's best selling novel, HELLO BEAUTIFUL is an Oprah Bookclub Pick. I didn't care for this story filled with foolishness. The poppycock plot centers around a family of four Padavano sisters. The two eldest, Julia and Sylvie who share an extremely tight bond until it unravels when Julie's husband and father of their infant daughter, William, decides he no longer wants to be married or a parent. Set in Chicago, William and Julie met as students at Northwestern in the 1980s. William is on the school's varstiy basketball team. William was raised by parents who never recovered from the death of their daughter which coincided with the time of William's birth. William's parent had no love to offer their son and were only too glad to dissociate with him when he left for college. The sisters were raised in an extremely close and loving household. When William's hoop dreams are shattered by an injury, he loses his drive and walks away from his wife and baby girl and into Lake MI intending to drown himself. Julia intends to have nothing more to do with him but younger sister Sylvie feels concern and a connection with him. Sylvie stays by William's side throughout his recovery in a mental hospital and professes her love for him after his release. This breaks every sister code in the book. Their mother is appalled by Sylvie and William's relationship. She tells her daughter, "It's unhealthy...It's like you're getting in bed with her marriage." Even Sylvie wondered, "If William was disappointed that her breasts were smaller than Julia's, her hips less curvaceous. Had Julia been a better lover?" Sister Emeline who is gay feels sympathetic for Sylvie, as she struggled with her choice of who to love. "I didn't want to love Josie. It was hard for me to accept the fact that we don't choose who we love." This insipid story is awash in soapy melodrama. Separated for two decades, Sylvie and Julie are only reunited when learning of Sylvie's terminal brain tumor diagnosis. Julia had maintained the fabrication to her daughter, Alice, her father was dead and was kept apart from her aunts and first cousin in Chicago. Alice first learns of her father being alive in her 20s. Furious with her mother for keeping this from her and wanting to meet her dad, she flies to Chicago to meet him on the day her Aunt Sylvie dies. Nonetheless, the funeral bridges the decades and the divides within the family caused by two sisters having married the same man and reconciliations and harmony ensues. Any literary comparison the author tires to make to "Little Women" is ludicrous. The writing is weary and shamelessly pitiful. I don't know why anyone would say hello to this nonsense, I say goodbye.
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