The Change Book Review: Our first introduction to The Change by Kirsten Miller was through a book review on Tiktok. The reviewer (Sydneyyybooks) usually does horror reviews, so we thought this was a horror book.
It’s not, yall! It has some horror elements, but this is a story of female empowerment & feminism, mixed with some supernatural elements.
Let us tell you why we loved this one – and the one big demerit it got from us.
This is a book review of The Change, a novel by Kirsten Miller with book recommendations of similar books we think you will enjoy.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links which, if used for purchase, will result in a small commission, at no additional cost to the buyer.
Slowprose Review Format
Generally speaking, we don’t think of ourselves as “serious” reviewers, so our format may be a little different. Here is what to expect when you are reading Slowprose book reviews:
- Cover Review – doing the cliche of judging a book by its cover.
- Book Blurb – we share the book jacket or Goodreads blurb about the plot.
- Intrusive Thoughts – these are the general thoughts and feelings we have about the book while reading it.
- Book review – our overall review and star ranking of the book
- Book aesthetics – this is how gorgeous we thought the pages of the book were, or how easy/hard it was to read, or how good the narrator was if it is an audio book.
- Book recommendations – we talk about the author’s other books or other books that remind us of this book in some form or fashion. Basically, this is our catch-all to talk about anything else that we want to.
To see our full review system, including our method of assigning and weighting stars, go here.
COVER REVIEW – The Change
The Change gets 2.0 & 4.0 for the covers
The cover above is the hard cover version of The Change. It gets low marks from us. It isn’t interesting or eye catching at all. Very generic and underwhelming. Nothing about it draws us in or compels us to pick it up, let alone check it out or buy it to read. If it hadn’t been for the book review we saw raving about this book, we wouldn’t have given it a second glance.
Looking at it again once we read the book, it gets a bump up of .5 because we get what it relates to now. But it is still SO disappointing because with what they were going for here, it could have been SO much better.
The red cover is the paperback version of The Change. It certainly is much better. We understand it has to promote itself with the quotes on the cover – but we hate that there are so many.
However, the red color, the graphics, the tag line (which is amazing) and imagery on the paperback – MUCH BETTER.
BOOK BLURB – The Change by Kirsten Miller
Given our extreme irrational fear of ever being a spoiler of an epic plot twist, we will just share the book insert or book blurb found on Goodreads to provide the information in terms of the plot:
The Change
In the small town Long Island oceanfront community of Mattauk, three different women discover that midlife changes bring a whole new type of empowerment…
After Nessa James’s husband dies and her twin daughters leave for college, she’s left all alone in a trim white house not far from the ocean. In the quiet hours of her late forties, the former nurse begins to hear voices for the first time. It doesn’t take long for Nessa to realize that the voices calling out to her belong to the dead—a gift she’s inherited from her grandmother, which comes with special responsibilities.
On the cusp of 50, suave advertising director Harriett Osborne has just witnessed the implosion of her lucrative career and her marriage. She hasn’t left her house in months, and from the outside, it appears as if she and her garden have both gone to seed. But Harriett’s life is far from over—in fact, she’s undergone a stunning and very welcome metamorphosis.
Ambitious former executive Jo Levison has spent thirty long years at war with her body. The free-floating rage and hot flashes that arrive with the beginning of menopause feel like the very last straw—until she realizes she has the ability to channel them, and finally comes into her power.
Guided by voices only Nessa can hear, the trio of women discover a teenage girl whose body was abandoned beside a remote beach. The police have written the victim off as a drug-addicted sex worker, but the women refuse to buy into the official narrative. They begin their own investigations into the girl’s murder, which leads to more bodies of young girls, and to the town’s most exclusive and isolated enclave, a world of stupendous wealth where the rules don’t apply. With their newfound powers, Jo, Nessa, and Harriett will take matters into their own hands…
INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS – The Change by Kirsten Miller
Really good opening and start to the book.
Freaking LOVED the three main characters coming together and the ending sentence of the first chapter.
Refreshing to focus on middle aged characters
Loving the supernatural, magical realism element!
Ok, getting bogged down a little bit.
Teetering on soapboxing….
Ok, we get it, she likes to smoke weed.
Really like the chapters that give backstory for each character, then jumping back to the main story line.
Good ending and wrap up – it got muddied down a bit but overall, well done.
THE CHANGE BOOK REVIEW
Slowprose Star Rating – 4.0 Stars
There was a lot we loved about this book. A few small tweaks would have made it a 5 star read for us, but after giving it some thought, this is a 4 star book.
Even though the title of this book should have given us a clue, we didn’t realize that this book was about middle aged women, nor did we realize until well into the book, that they all came into their power at menopause.
Duh, right? But we got there eventually. To be honest, we really liked that it didn’t focus on, or even say the word menopause. It just talked about each character reaching a point in her life where her true self was manifested, rather than the cliche midlife crisis bit. We absolutely loved that.
The character development is really good, particularly when it comes to Harriett and Nessa. The author spends a lot of time on Jo Levinson, but she seems less strong (oh the irony) than the other two. But overall, they were fantastically developed and rounded out.
We also really liked the supernatural element. When we were introduced to these characters and their supernatural abilities and how they were all drawn to each other for their designated purpose – sign us up! That was really fantastic, and we loved every second of it.
Then the story went into the weeds a bit. We think it could have benefited from a hard edit to cull out unnecessary information or eliminate bulk. It reminded us of Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch in that way. To us, both of these books would have greatly improved if they had been more refined and on point with a good edit.
We wanted to focus on our three main strong female characters and what they were going through both before they met, but even more so after they got together and figured out how and why they were all intertwined.
We weren’t really as interested or invested in Nessa’s thing with Franklin – it could have been significantly edited to still get the gist without so much time spent on it. Same goes for Jo’s husband. We guess they were talked about to show that not all men are bad, but more time was spent on them than necessary.
The other issue this book ran into was what we call the Soapbox Flaw. (See our explanation of what the Soapbox Flaw is in our Book Aesthetic section below.)
In this book, author Kirsten Miller really gets close to crossing into soapbox territory in her efforts to show that the patriarchy has been holding down, and hurting women, for a long time.
We love this message and absolutely related to the story of the women and how it impacted them over the years. Harriett’s story, in particular, was one we could really relate to. By telling her story in such a well done fashion, the author made her point.
She should have continued to just tell the story with this as a significant element of it, as it was riveting! Instead, she started to double down on the message, and it came off as overindulgent and off-putting. It just wasn’t necessary! We got it!
Anyway, even with those two criticisms, we overall really enjoyed The Change and would recommend it.
Slowprose Star Rating – 4.0 Stars
BOOK AESTHETICS – The Change by Kirsten Miller
The Soapbox Flaw
We love a book with a message, and particularly love it when the author successfully structures the book to tell an engaging story with great characters, and weaves the message throughout.
The Soapbox Flaw occurs when the author, instead of TRUSTING THE READER to see the overall point they are trying to make by organically integrating it into the story, chooses to get up on their soapbox and/or get preachy with the message at some point in the book.
We are always SO disappointed when this happens because it is completely unnecessary! Up until this point, the author had done an amazing job at conveying the message within the parameters of the story. We love that! We don’t love when the book has a clear departure to make a statement, and then returns back to the story that was being told.
(We can give examples of two other books that clearly did this – The House on the Cerulean Sea and Lessons In Chemistry.)
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
We mentioned a few other books in our review, and although we mentioned them because we were critical of an element in each book – overall, all three are excellent books and we do recommend them!
If you want memorable characters, we can’t think of a better book than The House on the Cerulean Sea for that! Plus, add in magical powers, and you have a wonderful book, even if it goes a bit too heavy on its fierce anthem.
If you want a feminist roar of rage from years of being held back or hurt by bad men, you will want to read Lessons In Chemistry. You can check out our full review of this book here.
If you want a modern day classic that won rave reviews, including the Pulitzer, with a story that weaves in and around the world of wealth & New York City, you want to read The Goldfinch.
Lastly, we are currently listening to a book that tackles the issue of the patriarchy in a different, but excellent, fashion. It is a story that makes you examine what would happen if women developed a power that made them as physically dangerous to men as men are to women.
We are currently about half way through, but it is interesting enough to add to our recommendations here. It is called The Power.
You can find all these and more in our storefront, Slowestuff Books From The Blog storefront.
The Change Book Review
We hope you enjoyed our Book Review of The Change by Kirsten Miller. If you pick it up, let us know what you thought of it once you read or listened to it!
If you know of other books similar to this one that you think we will love, please let us know what they are. We particularly love magical realism books, and when we get book recs from fellow readers it is just the best.
If you want more book posts, check out the Slowprose section of the blog where we have more book reviews, book lists, favorite authors, and more.
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Happy reading!
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