Ivy Scheider is a juggler-but not in the entertaining sense, mind you. She juggles her crazy life and just tries to survive one second to another. While her husband is on the road touring with a gospel music group, she stays home with the three kids and her aging parents.
She feels that she's the only sibling suited to take care of her parents because she doesn't trust the other two. At first it was only her mother, but then she takes in her father, who divorced her mother, without her mother knowing it.
She calls herself one of the sandwich generation-someone sandwiched between taking care of kids and taking care of aging parents. She writes a newspaper column offering support to other women in her situation. On top of that, she's trying to write a book.
There are many parts of Club Sandwich that are hard to review because the plot contains many realistic, everyday-life scenes that are driven by superb characters. Characters are the biggest thing Lisa Samson has over other female authors on the market. Without characters, her books would be very mediocre and typical.
However, these kinds of character based plots are usually limited to four and four point five star ratings because of their lack of complete originality.
That is true with Club Sandwich. While she builds up a strong base of good characters in the body of the book, the last chapter lacks originality because she tries to right too many wrongs. Too many things are sewn up to perfection except for one factor. This factor alone is original, but it is drowned out by all the other perfection.
I really wish Lisa wouldn't have done what she did in the last chapter. Otherwise it would have been five stars. She just couldn't leave well enough alone.
Nevertheless, Lisa Samson still impresses me more than most authors in this genre.
4 stars
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