Amy P. Knight

The Gunners by Rebecca Kauffman

I liked the idea of this book–a group of six childhood friends, one of them dies, the other five come back for the funeral–but I found the execution lacking. It seemed that various different balances were off–between past and present, for instance, or among the different characters. Two of them were drawn with more detail, which left the other three feeling like sketches, almost like afterthoughts (or, in their worst moment, like caricatures). And the notion that these enormously different people had stayed in touch into their 30’s somehow without telling each other the essential contours of their lives just didn’t ring true for me.