Bittersweet by Miranda-Beverly Whittmore

Warning: This review is going to spoiler the hell out of the book. This is quite an odd book and it is difficult to interpret both the author's intentions and the motives of Mabel, the first person narrator. The whole book is from the point of view of the ugly duckling Mabel who becomes friends with the glamorous Ev and her family. As I grew more and more frustrated with the utterly self-obsessed Mabel I began to wonder if the author was portraying her as an unreliable narrator and if we are supposed to dislike her? She certainly turns out just as unlikable as any of the family she exposes. Everything she discovers is pointed out in VERY BIG LETTERS, like the readers are unable to draw their own conclusions. Birch is flagged up as a bad guy from half-way through the novel by his cruelty to the dog, from there he is only a tiptoe away from becoming a Nazi Art looting father of incestuous children.

Anyway, the first half increasingly reads like a YA novel about the relationships between the young people, and I got increasingly impatient for the mystery element, as all Mabel seemed to be doing was mooning over Ev and her brother Galway (was it me or did he just seemed to be sort of tagged randomly with Mabel? All of a sudden he showed up and fell in love with her even though they had nothing in common other than her creepy obsession with his family?). The second half veers into overblown Gothic with the discovery of the incest, art looting and the murder, up until the horrible end where Mabel marries rescues Lu, marries Galway and the bad guy drowns. It just seems a bit, well, preposterous that everything get tied up so neatly and Mable 'wins' becoming part of the Winslow family.
I think I judged this harshly because with all the Paradise Lost references and some of the techniques she used such as deliberately obscuring the time setting, I was expecting this to be a bit more literary. As it was, I found it quite frustrating to read. 

I know I am no writer, just a woman who has read a lot of books, but in my humble opinion here is what I would do with it:

• Make Birch a more rounded character, not just an evil villain with a mask of geniality. All he needed really was a waxed moustache to twirl.
• Cut down the number of incestuous children to one, two makes it seem a bit overblown. There could also be a bit more doubt about the incest so that it looks more like Mabel is being manipulated.
• Make Mabel and Galway have something in common other than the creepy family, even if it's a liking for flippin' Paradise Lost. 
• Yes, I know it has the potential for being a bit dull and boring, but all that financial stuff Mabel was going into also had the potential for being quite interesting, I'm sure the Winslow's could have profiteered more from Great Depressions and wars, it's just I had the feeling the author was nervous about writing about it. 
• Focus more on Tilde, who is a much more interesting character than Indo, the colourful mad aunt. Indo isn't really needed to prompt Mabel's investigations, Mabel doesn't need a motivation, she is obsessed with the family anyway and an incurably nosy voyeur who seems to be there whenever anybody has sex.
• Change the pacing a little so that the mystery is drawn out more over the first half and it's less about meeting the 50,000 members of the family and Ev's relationship with John. We get it, it's a large clan.
• Change the ending, I suppose I would have found it more satisfying if Mabel had walked away and encountered Galway/Ev/Tilde in the future, subsequently finding that they had changed the family around, rather than Mabel being the catalyst and choosing to ignore everything that had gone on if the family returned the art.  As it is, nobody in this book seems to develop as a character, especially Mabel.
• Don't spell everything out in minute detail, readers can usually draw their own conclusions.This was particularly bad after Mabel discovered that Ev and John were brother and sister. We knew as soon as Mabel remembered that John's mother's name was Pauline, we didn't need Mabel explaining, we only needed her reaction. The subtle elements of the story get overlooked if there are aspects of the narrative that are applied with a paint roller rather than a delicate brush. For instance, the use of Paradise Lost as a metaphor, good, but not so good if it's used too much. I liked the Turtle bit too, but Lu didn't need to become a Marine Biologist.  

Anyway, I hope I haven't been too nasty and given constructive criticism. As a non-writer I don't like slating books, it's just that I thought this book had unrealised potential.