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2.5

Not a lot to say about Wood's The Weekend really. It's a competent, solid read with quite well written passages.

An account of three lifelong women friends in their 70s who come together over a weekend just before Christmas to pack up a beach home of a friend who has died. Some fairly strong reflections about ageing, looking back on life with all of its disappointments, compromises and betrayals. Lovely account of what it means to hold onto friendships throughout life, including costs of that.

For me though the characters feel a little like contrived caricatures, they blur into each other and at end I didn't really take all that much away from the read. An old dog features prominently as the pet of one of the women, I actually felt sorry for him in terms of the metaphorical baggage weighing him down and that he lugs around as the book unfolds. Also the climax is a rather strange account of a dinner party that has a kind of surreal edge that just did not really come together for me. It was clumsy and cliche for me.

I was looking forward to picking this one up, for some reason just didn't work for me. The third person narration might be part of it, it became a kind of dominating voice and style that ended up eroding any significant differences among the central characters. At least that was my impression.