The Pleasing Hour

'The Pleasing Hour' by Lilly King, is the story of how Rosie travels to France to become an Au Pair after she gave birth to a son and immediately handed him to her barren sister who longed for children. She is a postpartum mother without her own child while raising someone elses. The mother of the family is cold and distant, treating Rosie rather rudely. Despite that, she learns to love her new family and begins to emotionally heal.

I am not going to lie to you- this was the most confusing book I have ever read. I am not exactly sure why I stuck with it and read it until the end. I guess I was hoping for a magical moment where the author tied everything in and gave me that "ah-hah!" moment, which never came. There are chapters from the view points of Rosie, Nicole (the French mother), Nicoles mother, and the three children that Rosie looks after. I never could figure out what the underlying theme was. Rosie gets pregnant on purpose her senior year of high school simply because her sister wants a child so badly. When it comes time to hand her son over though, she doesn't want to, and ends up hating her sister for holding him first. And in the end she has an affair with the dad of the family she lives with. Nice. Nicole's mother has an affair with a German soldier and then gets pregnant with Nicole... who is Nicole's father? It never says. Then Nicole's mother kills herself and that's what leads to events leading up to Nicole moving to Paris with her aunt. As for the three childre, we read a chapter on the oldest daughter the night she loses her virginity, the youngest son wants to be priest, and the middle daughter's chapter made no sense whatsoever and didn't add to the story line in the slightest. This book was all over the place and so full of the weirdest, most inappropriate situations that do not need to be put down in the written word. 

When I finished the last word in the last chapter of the book, the only thing I thought was, "How in the hell did this book ever get published?!" Don't read this book. Seriously. It sucks.