Not a Fan

I know a lot of people love Anne Tyler, but I am not one of them. Her latest book, Digging to America, did not change my opinion. The premise of the story holds a lot of promise: two very different families are brought together when they each adopt baby girls from Korea. One of the couples is Iranian-American, the other middle-class white Americans. The cultural differences between the families and the way they adjust to their Korean daughters is interesting, although not at all surprising. The problem, from my point of view, in addition to the fact that nothing much happens, is that the characters are poorly developed and not very likable. At the end of the book, we know practically nothing about the two fathers, and the main thing we know about one of the mothers, Bitsy, is that she’s really judgmental and annoying. The most well developed character is one of the grandmothers, long-time widowed Maryam, who gets involved with the other grandfather, who has been recently widowed. But it felt like Tyler was holding back on revealing too much even about these characters