A Small Crowd of Strangers

By: Joanna Rose

Narrated by: Mia Gaskin

How does a librarian from New Jersey end up in a convenience store on Vancouver Island in the middle of the night, playing Bible Scrabble with a Korean physicist and a drunk priest? She gets married to the wrong man for starters - she didn't know he was "that kind of Catholic" - and ends up in St. Cloud, Minnesota. She gets a job in a New Age bookstore, wanders toward Buddhism without realizing it, and acquires a dog. Things get complicated after that.

Pattianne Anthony is less a thinker than a dreamer, and she finds out the hard way that she doesn't want a husband, much less a baby, and that getting out of a marriage is a lot harder than getting into it, especially when the landscape of the west becomes the voice of reason. A Small Crowd of Strangers, Joanna Rose's second novel, is part love story, part slightly sideways spiritual journey.

©2020 Joanna Rose (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

I loved the milieu

of the quaintish small town on Vancouver Island. The somwhat depressing back story in Minnesota is necessary to the story and I laughed when she works at the new agey bookstore.

tedious.

I didn't finish it. I was bored to tears and the characters were one dimensional.