Pickles Progress by Marcia Butler a four-star read that will pickle you. This could have been a five-star read if it kept going the way it started, but sadly it drifted off and foundered for the second half, I nearly gave it a three-star, but the first half pushed it over. Stan and Pickle and their whole family are just crazy, so crazy that it almost comes back to normal. If you like your fiction over the top with a side of crazy then you need this story in your life, its crazy and passionate and crazy again, but if you stick with it hopefully you will enjoy it.

'A worm in Pickle’s brain told him this was reasoning he should bite on. Everyone was entitled to a breakdown or a breakthrough, and if he were honest with himself, Pickle wasn’t sure which he were facing.'

What did I just read? Twin brothers Stan and Pickle McArdle are just as connected, though grown men, as they were in their toxic mother’s womb. They don’t live together anymore, which is a bit inconvenient for Pickle and Karen, but when Karen and her husband Stan get in an accident intoxicated out of their minds (a common occurence) a mixed up young woman named Junie becomes a strange catalyst for some serious sibling rivalry. Does it count as sibling rivalry if you’re unaware of it (Stan)? Is this entanglement a New York thing, kidding… It’s handy that Stan’s brother is on the police force, Pickle always comes through and cleans up their messes. This time the mess is coming home with Stan and Karen, Junie “a woman standing directly in front of them, perhaps five hundred yards away, with her hands at the side of her face, mouth open, like the Edvard Munch painting”, the reason for the accident. Boyfriend Jacob jumped off the bridge, but she didn’t follow. That’s the problem with pacts, someone often opts out after you’ve already committed, or chooses to do it without you. June is Pickle’s favorite month, could love be on the rise? Karen’s reasons for helping out a stranger in dire need of support begins to make sense as she befriends Junie, who feels like a freeloader. Stan isn’t thrilled about the young woman living in their brownstone, his nature is ‘odd’ but Karen seems more overbearing mother than wife.

Pickle, cleaned up all nice, takes in interest in Junie while also making demands on Karen, and what a deceptive piece our Karen is. Secrets, betrayals and at the heart of it all it began with a mother who chose one twin as her favorite. I kept having to remind myself this was written by a woman, Pickle has plenty of reasons for his rage towards Karen, his envy toward his brother, resentment too but I didn’t feel there was a woman’s voice, isn’t that odd? We’re meant to have empathy for Karen, but in my mind her arm didn’t take much twisting and certainly she isn’t as smart as she plays up when there are a million ways she could have handled everything. I know, it makes no sense until you read, but I refuse to post spoilers. Junie is this mess that could have been a hell of a character but instead spends more time in retreat.

I hate you, I love you would be the perfect summary for what is going on between all the major players. Karen has the perfect setup, she has Pickle right where she wants him but he isn’t playing her game anymore. Her control is dimishing. It’s that ‘breakdown’ or ‘breakthrough’ thing racing through Pickle’s veins, plans swirling through his mind that won’t allow him to live in shackles anymore, funny for a cop, how captive he’s allowed himself to be. Junie, despite Stan’s resistance, could be an antidote to all his misery. Stan is the most believable character, his artlessness, his lack of self-awareness, it’s obvious he doesn’t slip out of his own mind enough to wonder at everything happening all around him. It’s hard to hate him, there’s something childlike about him. The twins are wildly different, Pickle is abrasive where Stan is diluted in his ‘masculinity’ so to speak. Which unraveling Stan makes it easy to understand why their twisted mother favored him, if she had a bone in her body of maternal love, which is doubtful, it’s possible there was fear he would be lost on his own. Junie, I don’t know, she was more a presence than a character I could connect with. Pickle and Karen, those two are absolutely their own problem and each other’s. I just could not like either of them. I still don’t have a clue who Junie is, to be honest. I keep going back to her angry because she should have blazed brighter with such a wild start.

The ending, maybe a little too neat for me. I mean, all’s well that ends well, really? I want to witness the confrontations, you’re telling me everything just lines up? Who are these people?

Publication Date: April 9, 2019

Central Avenue Publishing

Pickle’s Progress by Marcia Butler

Well developed characters are the strength of this novel as we watch the McArdles go through their daily lives. Set in present day New York City, you can almost feel yourself there.

Stan and his wife Karen run a business together, while Stan’s twin brother Pickle, a NYC cop, is a constant presence in their lives.
Happenstance brings the three McArdles to meet young Junie who will change all their lives. For the better? Maybe.

Though some of the events are predictable, there are enough surprises to intrigue you to read to the very end.Human weaknesses afflict every character in the story.

I encourage you to read Pickle’s Progress for
an enjoyable, easy-flow tale about people who could be your friends, neighbors, or indeed, even you.

I gave up on this book before it really started and gave it a second try and am so delighted with the outcome. A twisted, crazy love story ending with deception. The whole twin brother theme was quite original. Keep reading this page turner.

It's gritty; at times grubby; in your face if you like, but it's damn entertaining!
Refreshing is what it is, to sit down and just cruise through a story without too much cerebral gymnastics. There's lessons though; we don't get off that easily. Pickle IS a grub and treats women off-handedly, is self-centred and self indulgent. Until he meets Janie, that is, who tips his unbalanced existence into freefall. Does Pickle make any progress? That's the paradox that awaits the reader of this well-worthy novel.
Thanks to Netgalley and Central Avenue Publishing for this ARC.

I was quite looking forward to reading this book based on the blurb. In fact it is such a different kind of book, that immediately I was pulled into the writing. There is a different feel to it than most contemporary fiction today. With that said, the characters are all appallingly unlikable, which is okay, and can be fascinating at times. However, there was nothing redeeming about this story at all. The people are so unlikable, you just don't care about them after a while. Kind of over the top writing in every extreme, these characters all seemed borderline crazy and barely able to function. Maybe that was the point. With not much of a plot to delve into, there was nothing revealing about the book, and it just kind of went on and on. I really wanted to like this book, but gave up about half way through. Thanks to Netgalley for an advance reader copy.

I received a complimentary copy of this book through Netgalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.
Karen and Stan almost hit a woman late one night while driving home drunk from a friend's house. The woman, Junie, just witnessed her boyfriend commit suicide by jumping off the bridge. Stan decides to call Pickle, his twin brother and also a cop, to cover up his dui. Karen invites Junie to stay with them while she recovers from the shock. What follows is a complicated story of past childhood trauma and twisted relationships.

I loved this book. I could not put it down. When I wasn't reading it, I was thinking about it. Thinking about Pickel, Stan, Junie & Karen. Loved the characters. I felt like I was in the brownstone with these people. One of the best books I have read all year. Thanks so much for the early edition. It is my hope that Marcia Butler will continue to write.

Stan and Karen McArdle, slightly drunk, were driving home across the George Washington Bridge when they saw a young woman in their lane. Stan swerved and crashed, hitting the railing, but instead of calling 911, immediately called his twin, Pickle, a police officer. The woman, Junie, had been on the bridge with her boyfriend, Jacob, with whom she had a suicide pact. They’d argued, and when she turned away, he jumped. Karen ushered Junie into the backseat of their Volvo and vowed to take care of her.

Karen installed Junie into the basement of the brownstone she, Stan, and Pickle owned together. The brownstone itself was a source of contention since Karen and Stan had renovated the bottom two levels and moved in a year prior, but Pickle was impatiently waiting for the renovation of his top floors.

Flashbacks reveal that Karen, Stan, and Pickle have had a long, complicated relationship, made more difficult by the influence of (now deceased) Mrs. McArdle who inexplicably favored Stan and despised Pickle. The delicate balance of their threesome was disturbed by Junie’s arrival. Pickle believed she was his soulmate and considered retiring from the police force, Stan stopped drinking and relaxed some of his obsessive ticks, and Karen feared the destruction of the harmony she’d stoked for years.

Pickle’s Progress is a character-driven novel, and it focuses more on Pickle and Karen, to me the least likable. While I don’t require characters to be likeable--in fact, too likable, they lose their complexity--but Pickle and Karen are simply mean. Pickle, for example, lies about Jacob to Junie so he will have a better chance with her. Karen consistently puts down Stan and Pickle and manipulates those around her, when she isn’t ordering them directly. The title implies that Pickle will develop psychologically, but while circumstances change for him, it doesn’t seem that he has really come to terms with his past or resolved to alter his behavior in the future.

The dialogue is written to be sharp and witty, but to me it didn’t land, and instead felt clunky and labored. At one point, Karen and Stan were compared to George and Martha of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? If Butler was trying to emulate his repartee, she wasn’t quite skillful enough to execute it (though who is?).

An epilogue, in the form of a letter written three years after the main events of the novel, indicate that some interesting developments occurred, perhaps more interesting than those we were privy to in the narrative.

I suppose if I am reaching, I would say the novel speaks to the need to forgive oneself and step away from the past to find love in the present, but the message isn’t completely clear, and I’m a bit baffled what I’ve read.

A fantastic, original read. Dark, entertaining, compelling - it's the story of an unlikeable group of people who, somehow, you end up rooting for anyway. Absolutely loved it.

This book was okay. Took a bit for me to get into it, but once I did, it was not too bad. Not something I would normally read, but I like checking out new/different books!

Pickle’s Progress #
Marcia Butler
Central. Avenue Publishing

This book is different from any other book I have read. It started out slow for me and it took awhile to get into the spirit of the storyline. The characters include twin brothers, “Pickle”, and Stan who happen to be identical in a scary way. Both brothers are in love with the same woman. This causes much mayhem, as you can imagine. I kept waiting for them to discover this about each other. The book is somewhat funny in spots, sad in others. There are some sexual scenes sprinkled throughout, so if that bothers you, you might want to avoid this book. Overall, I enjoyed the book more than I had expected. It does seem to end fairly abrupt and you have to fill in the blanks of all your questions on your own. I expect this book will receive a large number of successes.
Thank you to Central Avenue Publishing and NetGally for an advanced read copy of this book for a fair and honest review. 3 Stars for me.

Oh New York. What a sh*tty city to live in, what a great setting for a story. It’s inexplicable, really, how this noisy obscenely expensive overcommercialized overrated place creates such compelling tales, expect to blame it on the extreme conditions that being in NY presents. But actually I didn’t just select this book for its setting, it was also the title. Not just because it featured an alliteration (of which I’m so fond), but it just seemed interesting. Pickle is in fact a grown man, a NYPD cop no less, who managed to get through decades with that absurd moniker, a childhood aberration of his given name. His twin brother and their mother’s favorite survived his early years as a much more conventional Stan. Stan and Pickle are identical in appearance and very different in most other respects, expect possibly their taste in women. That explains the bizarre love triangle in which Stan, Pickle and Stan’s wife Karen are locked and have been for years. When their triangle inadvertently becomes a square after Karen takes in a stranger, the dynamics are all thrown off. Things are suddenly changing, Pickle is getting more demanding of his fair share of their brownstone investment property, Karen and Stan aren’t drinking (something they were doing very enthusiastically and regularly until now). Reluctantly and apprehensively progress will be made. And not just by Pickle. So this is essentially a relationship book, possibly even described as a very unconventional love story. A character driven drama with a very enjoyable and very dark humorous undertones. A surprisingly compelling and enjoyable read despite the lack of likeable (or at least conventionally likeable) characters. In fact this mismatched quartet and everyone in it with their private obsessions and questionable motivations are very much a mess, but an interesting one to behold. The writing definitely helped, it was amusing in just the right way. This book got much acclaim from some very respected and respectable sources and for me it lived up to the praise. Very auspicious for a fictional debut too. Thanks Netgalley.

I'm not sure if I liked this book or not. Maybe I didn't. It's certainly not a comfortable book. However, it's one of those books that seems to be staying with me, a book I keep finding myself thinking about, so maybe that's better than being comfortable.

I try very hard not to offer spoilers, and I'm sorry if I do that inadvertently.

This is a book about four very damaged people. Identical twins, Sam and Pickle; Sam's wife, Karen: and Junie, the girl Sam and Karen find on a bridge after a failed suicide pact.

For me, the fascination of the book was in the gradual unveiling of the characters. My thinking about them shifted dramatically as the book went on - by the end my opinions of them had swung through about 180 degrees. That's how it is in real life, of course. We meet someone who seems really nice, and then find out more about them, feel less positive, may even end up disliking them. We meet someone who seems really difficult, and gradually grow to understand them.

The main problem for me was Pickle himself. Even though I grew to understand more about him, I found it harder and harder to like him as the book went on. Even though he was right, even though he'd been wronged more than anyone - I still struggled to like him as a person.

The other issue was the ending. I've read a few books like this recently - the ones where you start to think "That's how it should go - how are we going to get there?" - and then the author just skips all the stages of "getting there" and leaps to the ending.

Overall, though, it's an interesting, disconcerting book, and I'm glad I read it. It evokes a New York I've not really seen anywhere else, and the people in it felt like real people.

Thanks to NetGalley for letting me get my hands on an ARC. This is my honest review.

Started off well,or as well as you can when you have two drunks and a suicide.
The characters seemed interesting,and I particularly liked Pickle,who seemed the nicest of the lot.
As the book went on,all four of the main characters became unlikable to Me,and I didn't feel the story was going anywhere.
I almost didn't bother reading the epilogue.

Unfortunately I just could not connect to anything in the book the characters nor the storyline.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Central Avenue Publishers for my eARC in exchange for honest unbiased review

Pickle's Progress hinges on something all novels do--you connecting with the characters. And I just couldn't here. I never connected to Stan, Pickle, Junie, or Karen enough to care because there wasn't anything for me to connect with/to as their lives wound together and together again. They were all just a collection of traits, and the process of fitting into each other felt like watching someone else putting together a puzzle you've seen before.

From the beginning I loved this novel - brilliantly drawn characters set against an atmospheric New York background. What drew me in was that the four main characters are not the usual literary types, but down-to-earth and larger-than-life: Pickle who works for the police force, his twin brother, Stan, his wife Karen and the young girl they take in after her boyfriend throws himself off the George Washington bridge. The dialogue is wise-cracking and hard-hitting but undercut by loss and despair, and the story builds and builds until, in the middle of the novel something goes wrong, or it just doesn't happen. I was invested - I was at 50% on my Kindle before I realised the story was stagnating. At that point the dialogue became dull, the sentences were repetitively the same and the whole novel flopped. Like a beautiful soufflé rising and rising until it goes too far and collapses, flat as a pancake. Marcia Butler is a very good writer but Pickle fails to make the progress promised.

When Karen and Stan are driving home, a woman, Junie, flags them down, because her boyfriend has just jumped to his death from a bridge. They call Stan’s identical twin brother, Pickle, to help them.
Karen invites Junie to stay in their home because she feels sorry her and also as a buffer for her dysfunctional marriage.