The Only True Genius in the Family by Jennie Nash

My mother has me pick out books for her while I am at work and more than once she has asked me for the "type of book where nothing bad happens". I was always curious about what this would look like. I have generally thought that novels were about bad things happening and people dealing with those bad things.

This book fits the bill and the results were, well, boring.

Claire is a food photographer. Her father was a famous landscape photographer who recently passed away and left control of his art to his granddaughter, Bailey, whose own art career is about to take off. My problem with this whole book is that Claire is so passive that she lets her father and her daughter push her back and forth. She doesn't feel her own worth because she constantly compares herself to her family. She barely makes a move in this book and most of what she does is blindingly horrible. (For instance, she paints on one of her daughter's paintings. She seems to know this is wrong but goes into something like a daze.)

In the end, this was a book about a woman trying to find her own worth. She does, eventually, but the reader has to sit through the type of story that doesn't excite any true emotions to get there.