"# Charlotte unhinged."

Preferring to come to a book with as few preconceptions as possible, I rarely read the given synopsis until after the story is finished but, for this book I did read it first, liked the concept and purchased the audio version with great anticipation. It was slightly unusual in that, alongside the narrator, Shvorne Marks, there was a full cast of actors sandwiched between the first person monologue chapters, making contributory comments to events on the Hive, social media channel. And the introduction was good, or at least curiously exciting.
Then came the dreaded words, One Year Earlier, and it was downhill all the way from there: a mundane, poorly written story about one woman in her late twenties - the voice telling the story - and her three equally pathetic and unlikable friends, all with enormous emotional baggage (could be because, despite being almost thirty, they still acted like silly adolescents, making memories of 'best night's' drinking alcoholic drinks they couldn't afford, eating food they couldn't pronounce and waking up next to men they couldn't remember f***ing). Unedifying, tedious and repetitive whingeing on about their predictably unsatisfactory relationships and the need of a woman for children, together with a seemingly miraculous physical growth rate of unborn embryos, makes this story even more untrustworthy and unrealistic. Childish, but not good enough for for YAs - they deserve much better.

But I did read to the end: I guess inertia set in, so one star for that.

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