Another book club book that I guess for the most part I enjoyed, though I really have difficulty in classifying my response to it.
I found myself caught up in the story - it was easy to ignore the wackos, loud teenagers, and smelly people on the bus while I was reading it - I was able to easily lose myself in the story. But I also found myself terribly annoyed at the narrator for being such a stupid woman.
I suppose ease of read and capturing my attention is probably indicative of the simplicity of the prose? It didn't challenge with complex sentence constructions or difficult concepts (which of course provide their own sense of delight when you master them) but I'm sure that the plot will not stick with me and I can feel it fading even now, only a few weeks later.
The premise is that a New York morning show reporter becomes fascinated by "Prairie City" in the heart of the midwest during a news story and moves there, ostensibly to write a series of reports - "quality of life" reports - for the show in which she demonstrates to New Yorkers how quality of life improves out in the midwest. Her life does improve in some ways, but she brings her annoying self and her urban assumptions to the prairie city, which gets her into trouble in reading people, danger, and motivations.
The character annoyed me, but it was a fun "plane ride" kind of book.