The Southern novel, with its soap opera-style plots and quaint characters and drawling dialogue, is really wearing thin for me. It just seems so tired, like even it is weary of repeating the same plots, characters and settings. I found this example to be particularly tiresome. There are too many characters to keep track of, so you don’t care about anyone very much, and thus you find it difficult to muster up any interest in their entangled love lives, which forms the basis of the plot. I wouldn’t have finished this at all if it wasn’t a signed edition that I wanted to keep.