PEOPLE PERSON by Candice Carty-Williams

If there’s one thing I like less in a book than bad writing, it’s a silly plot.  This book reminds me of Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People, and maybe it’s no coincidence that both have the word “people” in the title.  Here we have five half-siblings (same father, four different mothers) trying to dispose of a body that wasn’t really dead.  After this wacky incident, the story improves somewhat but not enough.  Dimple (a ridiculous name in a ridiculous plot) is the half-sibling whose ex-boyfriend Kyron slips and cracks his head open after he tries to strangle Dimple.  She scratches his face in an effort to slip out of his grasp and fears that those scratches will mark her as a murderer.  She then enlists the assistance of her four half-siblings, whom she has met only once, and they all reach the unlikely agreement that they should wrap Kyron in a tarp and bury him at a construction site.  After Kyron comes back to life, he attempts to blackmail Dimple, not knowing that she had four accomplices.  I get that this is supposed to be a feel-good story about family members coming together, but I would have liked a less ludicrous crisis as a catalyst to their bonding.  Plus, Dimple’s role as a social media influencer just makes her that much more of a caricature rather than a robust character.  Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.