Wishing for more from Goldengrove

I finished reading Goldengrove yesterday morning, before setting off for another day of friendship and holiday camaraderie. It's a book that I am very glad to have read, for I'd wondered about it in theory and needed to appraise it for myself, in actuality. Goldengrove is the story of 13-year old Nico who loses her older sister, suddenly, in an accident at the lake. Little by little, Nico (the narrator) takes on (at the urging of the sister's boyfriend) the traits and appearance of her lost sister, while the father and mother each fall apart in their own ways.

It sounds promising, I know. But the book didn't sit quite right with me on a number of levels. There was its tone—too adult-knowing, too retrospectively infused, on the one hand, and bogged down with surface teen observations, even cliches, on the other. There was the molasses stick of passages (about, say, the side effects of arthritis medications) that advanced neither character nor plot. There was the promise of entanglement, even outright spookiness, but things moved along at too matter-of-fact a pace to lose this reader in anticipation or wonder.

There was dialogue, long passages of it, that sounded like this:

"How are you, Nico?" (the mother of Aaron, the boyfriend) said.

"Okay," I said. "I guess. How's Aaron?"

Aaron's mother eyed the book and let it answer for her.

"Not great," she said. "It's been hard."

"I know," I said.

"I'm sure you do," she said.

"Say hi to him for me," I said. "Tell him to stop by the store and say hi."

"I will," she said.

"Really!" I said, startling myself. "I'd really like to see him."

"I will," she repeated." Take care of yourself, dear."

Lots of "said's" in that, for sure. Nothing the least bit turgid or lean (one or the other might have spiced it), nothing original, nothing that draws a deeper portrait of the characters (this is a rare interaction with Aaron's mother; should she not have been distinguished somehow here, either by what she says, or how?). To me, this passage, like so many others, feels like placeholder writing—like an author sketching out an outline that will be later embellished or deepened.

Except that the "later" didn't happen.