REVIEW: PRETTY LITTLE WORLD, BY MELISSA DE PINO; ELIZABETH LA BAN

 

On a cozy street in Philadelphia, three neighboring families have become the best of friends. They can’t imagine life without one another—until one family outgrows their tiny row house. In a bid to stay together, a crazy idea is born: What if they tear down the walls between their homes and live together under one roof? And so an experiment begins.

My Thoughts: What started as a broken pipe that caused flooding through the homes of the three couples had turned into something more.

Mark, the building expert in their midst realized that something in the original construction was not right. A brick firewall, which should have prevented what happened, is missing. So, after some conversations and a consultation with another builder, the taking down of the walls becomes a solution. And the start of communal living.

But how will the three couples and their assorted children figure out how to live together, sharing the household and the chores, while maintaining any kind of privacy? Will the lines blur, making it impossible to keep any semblance of normalcy? Will the children lose their sense of having their own family? What will the neighbors think, and how can they keep their secret?

Stephanie and Hope were two of the women in the equation, and right away I realized how much I disliked them. Stephanie had no sense of personal space, and seemed to have no problem taking whatever she needed without any consideration as to who owned an item. Hope was judgmental and controlling, expecting the others to meet her expectations.

Celia was the most detached from the trio of women, as she had a high powered job that kept her away a lot.

An illness, some infidelities, and a continued blurring of the lines had me confused about who belonged to whom. I started to get the couples mixed up…was Leo with Hope, or with someone else? Who did Mark turn to after his illness? How would his liaison change the group dynamic?

What ultimately happened in Pretty Little World surprised me…since I expected some of what eventually unfolded. But the final pages had me scratching my head. Could such an experiment be impossible to move beyond? 4 stars.

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