Used World by Haven Kimmel (2007)

I am sorry I found this book to be tedious and I completed it only by inertia, as I just kept putting in the next CD hoping it would get better. I read one review on Amazon (where real people review books) that found the characters and descriptions so lackluster, that she didn't even finish the book. I too found the descriptions of this small Indiana town unappealing. It's not that I dislike small towns - I've lived in one and somebody like Jan Karon does them great justice. Kimmel's main three characters - women who work together in an antique store (hence the title) - and who are fighting various painful pasts - just did not inspire me. Her descriptions were so slow, that I would lose track of things - maybe it was partly because I listened instead of read it. (spoiler alert) I didn't understand till the very end that Hazel's mother had been doing illegal abortions. I caught on sooner that Claudia's problem was she was too tall, though in actually getting the book from the library I realized that was mentioned in the first sentence of the book about the mirror being too short. Beckah was the totally out of it, raised in a conservative religious cult girl, that worked hard to get out of her destructive home, but it was hard to read her story. Hazel was the crazy old hippie lady that I would usually love, but I just didn't. I didn't get where Kimmel was going with her religious passages either. Everyone's story does get tied together by the end of the book in sort of interesting ways, but the road there was not interesting enough for me to try anything else by this author.