Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes by Kathleen West @BerkleyPub @kwestbooks #BookReview

Timely, relevant & compelling!

MINOR DRAMAS & OTHER CATASTROPHES by KATHLEEN WEST is a fascinating, artful, and captivating debut novel that immediately grabbed my attention and held strong right to the very end. There is a full cast of characters here but mainly revolves around Julia Abbott a stage mom who is your typical helicopter parent and a school teacher, Isobel Johnson who Julia is harassing. The soap opera antics of Julia Abbott made this quite entertaining, amusing and definitely a fun one for me to read.

There are quite a few subjects explored here and characters to follow along with but surprisingly this wasn’t a heavy read by no means for me and I didn’t seem to have a problem with keeping everyone straight. The multiple character perspectives made this quite interesting and an easy book to read that I zipped right through.

KATHLEEN WEST delivers an intriguing, witty, and well-written story here that was extremely readable. I really appreciated that while I would say that this was more of a lighthearted tale it did have a substantial amount of truth and value to the storyline. The author did a wonderful job of fully immersing me into this story and keeping me interested. I can totally see this story being made into a movie.

Another winning from our “not our normal read” stack of books that Elisha from Berkley sends our way!!

Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes by Kathleen West was such a great surprise for me and I loved the different take she took on high school politics, the privileged bubble and those overbearing parents known as helicopter parents. She takes an interesting and sharp look through helicopter mother who becomes the gossip of the school and teacher Isobel whose teaching methods come under fire by those helicopter parent. They find themselves each with a different conflict that catches up to them on social media and through the students’ POV, we see how they become the ones with the voice of reason.

The clean pose and tight plotting around the adults behaving badly keeps the drama low and there is no teenage drama, allowing the story to be fun and entertaining from start to finish.

Norma’s Stats:
Cover: Eye-catching, relevant, intriguing, impactful and excellent representation to storyline.
Title: The title immediately intrigued me and I think it is a fitting representation to storyline. There was definitely plenty of drama to be had here and some catastrophic decisions that’s for sure.
Writing/Prose: Well-written, readable, straightforward, easy to follow, and captivating.
Plot: Engrossing, lighthearted, relevant, funny, shocking, thought-provoking, interesting, steadily-paced, and entertaining.
Ending: A satisfying, fun, pleasing, and neat resolution.
Overall: This was a very good, fun, entertaining, and lighthearted book with some substance that I thoroughly enjoyed. Would recommend!

Thank you so much to Elisha at Berkley Publishing for kindly gifting us a copy of this book.