Having Kids Forces You to Deal with Cliques All OVER AGAIN…

I don’t know if you have children…I also don’t know if you have the same experience… but for me? Having kids is like going back to school all over again as I struggle to navigate the hierarchy of the “room moms” while being a working mother (I’m a high school teacher! you’d think they’d cut me some slack) and not knowing all the ” unwritten rules of smug Kindergarten momhood”. Let’s just say that I’m not going to be Homecoming Queen of the kindergarten moms any time soon, unless they’re planning to dump pig’s blood on me.
But enough about me…this is about Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies. On the surface this book is about a group of parents who all have kids attending kindergarten. And for one mom, my experience mirrors hers, but for different reasons. By chance, or by having older children, friendships and alliances are made– as are enemies (due to accusations and suppositions). It’s written in a 3rd person perspective from three different characters (mostly, with minor interjections from tertiary characters). The story lines cross and from the tertiary characters we get “what people think they saw” versus what actually happened from the primary characters. We know that something is going to happen at Trivia Night…
We know that all perceptions will be debased and the multitude of truths will come out. We also know at Trivia Night, someone is going to die (from about page 10 so it’s not a spoiler)–but we don’t know who that person will be. In fact, I’ll say that I was kind of surprised who ends up dead.
I enjoyed the book. it was a quick page turner and I felt invested in most, if not all of the characters and enjoyed seeing the different perspectives of events and how the different “truths” exist. The feeling that something was culminating as the end swirled near was fantastic, I almost thought it should’ve ended right there because the last 10 pages seemed to “wrap things up all neatly”, I would’ve preferred a little more open-endedness, but that said, it was a fun read. Maybe something I’d categorize as a “beach read” but not in a pejorative sense of the word but because it was an interesting book (that deals with some very serious…I mean VERY serious topics…but the way that Melrose Place dealt with serious issues. It could certainly be a major flaw but I enjoyed the characters and the plot enough that I didn’t get mired in that).