The Right Thing

By: Amy Conner

Narrated by: Kate Baldwin

On a scorching August day in 1963, seven-year-old Annie Banks meets the girl who will become her best friend. Skinny, outspoken Starr Dukes and her wandering preacher father may not be accepted by polite society in Jackson, Mississippi, but Annie and Starr are too busy sharing secrets and playing elaborate games of Queen for a Day to care. Then, as suddenly as she appeared in Annie's life, Starr disappears.

Annie grows up to follow the path ordained for pretty, well-to-do Jackson women - marrying an ambitious lawyer, filling her days with shopping and charity work. She barely recognizes Starr when they meet twenty-seven years after that first fateful summer, but the bond formed so long ago quickly reemerges. Starr, pregnant by a powerful married man who wants her to get out of town, has nowhere to turn. And Annie, determined not to fail her friend this time, agrees to drive Starr to New Orleans to get money she's owed.

During the eventful road trip that follows, Annie will confront the gap between friendship and responsibility; between her safe, ordered existence and the dreams she's grown accustomed to denying.

Moving, witty, and beautifully told, The Right Thing is a story of love and courage, the powerful impact of friendship, and the small acts that can anchor a life - or, with a little luck, steer it in the right direction at last.

©2014 Amy Conner (P)2014 Recorded Books

Light and fun

This book was a story of maturity and personal identity and how sometimes it gets mixed up with the right thing to do

Just ok

This book was just ok for me, I wanted to really like it, heck I got the paperbook in a Goodreads giveaway but wanted to get it done so listened to it on audio.

I liked these girls much more as children than I did as adults I felt neither one was very likeable. Annie a put upon southern housewife with an eating disorder (no they didn’t delve into that too much but it was so obvious by things she said) who has been desperately trying to get pregnant with no luck. She doesn’t seem too happy with her life when a chance meeting with her best friend from 2nd grade Starr (who she hasn’t seen since). Starr is in the middle of a scandal she is pregnant by a married man who is also a society bigwig and when Starr asks for Annie’s help Annie lies to her husband and goes off with Starr to help her out. And as you can guess things don’t go as planned.

I felt these characters weren’t very fleshed out, I like a book where I care about what happens to the characters and that just didn’t happen in this book , I think I liked the secondary characters more than I liked the main characters. I liked Annie’s mom and Annie’s aunt Tuti in the flashback scenes and the girls’ friend Betty.

And the ending was just well blah, I think if we had seen them from childhood and the story had been more linear instead of the alternating chapters I don’t know maybe I say that because I really enjoyed the parts where they were children but neither grew up to be very likeable.

So I guess what I am saying is I enjoyed parts of this book and other made me cringe, from the choices these two women make. Also if you haven’t seen your “BFF” since 2nd grade don’t you think they may have changed and just possibly you don’t have anything in common anymore? In this day and age of Facebook I know I have found that out when re-connecting with people from my past that maybe once we were friends but now they are a wackadoodle (and they probably think the same of me).

Now onto our narrator Kate Baldwin her voice is fine but for the love of god she needs to learn to control her breathing better there were times she sounded like a fish out of water gulping for breath and it was very off-putting. If she learns that, I would listen to her again because her voice and characters were well done but I had a hard time getting over the gulps of breath she was taking.

2 ½ Stars