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If this book were a meal it would be a 10-course dinner with quite a few savory morsels, but settle in because you’ll be cutting through a bit of fat and gristle and there’s going to be a lot chewing.

There is a good story here, but it is buried under an avalanche of run-on sentences and a surfeit of words. One sentence clocked in at 157 words and at more than 500 pages, reading often became arduous. And then there were the tortured sentences:

The vulpine abilities of his body, incongruous with the benign aesthetic magnetism of his persona.

This is the kind of stylized writing that I often find with debut authors from vaunted MFA programs and I want to say stop it, you don’t need to use all of your words or tricks in one book. Just tell me a story and tell it to me well.

That’s the bad news.

The good news about this exhaustive feast is that if you’re into family dramas and don’t mind them being on the side of overwritten, then this one delivers in numerous ways, both painful and heartwarming. The characters are well-drawn and the daughters are all irritating in different ways. I know that doesn’t sound like a selling point, but I do appreciate an author’s ability to make me feel, even if that feeling is one of exasperation.

Now pass the Tums.