The form of Life on the Refrigerator Door, Alice Kuipers’ first novel, is not exactly a standard one: the entire book consists of notes that appear on a fridge over the course of nine months.

The fridge in question belongs to 15-year-old Claire and her mother, a single parent who works long, erratic hours as a doctor in the maternity ward of a local hospital. Because of the pair’s busy and often opposing schedules, the fridge door is the venue on which, it is implied, the majority of their communication takes place. The novel opens with a note from Mom to Claire, asking her to pick up some groceries on her way home from school. Claire responds in a decidedly teenage tone – she often ends sentences with multiple punctuation marks.

As the notes accumulate, the reader learns the details of Claire’s social life – the names of her friends, how often she spends time with her father, the name of the older boy she eventually starts dating – but the mother’s notes are decidedly less revelatory, until it becomes clear that she has been preoccupied by a serious health issue.

Kuipers prefaces her novel with a poem by William Carlos Williams, one written in spare and unselfconscious language, suggesting that this is the tone Kuipers’ own novel will take. Unfortunately, the notes between Claire and her mother are clichéd and sentimental. Claire is the typical dramatic teenager; her mother is the typical doctor who neglects her own health until serious problems can’t be avoided. After the severity of Mom’s illness becomes clear, she leaves notes saying she’s gone to the river for a walk, ostensibly to clear her head. As her health worsens, the nature of the information exchanged in the notes becomes increasingly serious.

As a result, it becomes unbelievable that the fridge door would still serve its primary role in their communication. Kuipers’ novel begins as a lighthearted look at familial bickering, but is ultimately a disappointingly sentimental portrait of a typically dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship.