Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

All together, this was a pretty good book. The characters were realistic, believable, and beautifully detailed. The way things were described in this book was gorgeous. However, when I put it down, I was unsatisfied. It ended rather abruptly, and while the epilogue answered the hanging questions, it still didn't quite work for me. I'd give it three out of five stars.

The girl of vinegar in question is Twenty-nine year old Kate, a preschool teaching assistant, looking after her scatterbrained scientist of a father, and her sixteen year old, flirtatious, presumably airhead sister, Bunny. Kate is a bitter, closed off creature of habit. She's rude to her family, she's a bad role model for the children she looks after, and is inconsiderate of people in general.

When her father's lab assistant, Pyoter, needs to convince Immigration not to ship him home (as he and Kate's father are evidently at the edge of a scientific breakthrough), the obvious solution is reminiscent of The Proposal (Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds) with the exclusion of Alaska and Betty White.

The first half of the book is Kate being appalled at her father's request, and reluctantly tolerant of Pyoter's sparse knowledge of English. The second half is full of poor quality selfies, meatless meat-mash, halfhearted wedding arrangements, dreamcatchers, and stolen mice.

Like I said before, it was a good book. I enjoyed the wide range of detailed characters. But, no matter how great the people where, there wasn't much development. Kate never got nicer, and it didn't seem like she ever really started liking Pyoter, she just suddenly accepted the marriage. Her father never focused more on his daughters and less on his work. Bunny had a few moments where she dropped her ditzy act and showed some nerve, but it didn't last long. Pyoter seemed rather out of character for a last few chapters, which I know was deliberate, but it didn't seem like it was explained well enough. I, being a sucker for good redemption arch's and character development, was rather disappointed.

Family friendly-wise, there was some slight cursing, but it was otherwise very clean. Probably a 13+ kind of book. It was apparently a re-telling of The Taming of The Shrew by Shakespeare; it's been too long since I read that for me to tell you if it was a good retelling, but I can tell you that it was good book.