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Title: Hackneyed
Review: Reading this author's The Secret Life of Bees left me with high hopes for this novel. This book was dreadful, with a hackneyed plot, nearly uniformly weaker writing, utterly unbelievable and unsympathetic characters, and a disturbing message that has been much better delivered by numerous less promising authors. Almost every single "surprise" element of the leading character's less-than-convincing journey was telegraphed from the first pages. A terrible disappointment.
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