I normally have my review half-written in my head before I start writing it, but I just don’t even know what to say about this book. Let’s start with a necessary disclaimer: I picked this up as a married woman with one daughter, recently off an “I can’t have any more kids” health crisis (in my case it wound up resolved, but I felt the feels), and I had recently taken in a homeless woman with a baby and it was causing a lot of conflict with my husband. That…actually…is the plot of this book. I can just skip any kind of plot summary, because there it is.
So I picked up this book very prepared to love it, and extremely interested to see how it turned out. Maybe it would be like visiting a fortune teller! Who knows!
A quarter of the way in, I was annoyed. It was getting weird how many times the author referred to clouds as “obese,” and a character has a bruise that she describes as ochre. There’s nothing wrong with that, but let’s be honest here, ochre is kind of a thesaurus word, which is fine, but you can’t reuse the same thesaurus word a bunch of times. And this damn bruise is referred to as ochre more then ten times throughout the book. Also, the typos. They were insane. Like the person who “spoke allowed.” It was distracting.
But still I pressed on, trying to love this book.
I discovered that the main character and I had more in common than our oddly specific circumstances. In fact, we were almost the same person. So her husband’s raw disdain for her through at least 3/4 of the book was uncomfortable to read, and…without spoiling anything, let’s just say that I certainly hope Heidi and I branch off before the final act.
This book had all the elements of something I would love, but it just didn’t really do it for me. Despite being a lot like Heidi in a lot of ways, I didn’t like any of the characters. The tension that everyone loved about it wasn’t there for me, I saw the plot twist coming barely halfway into the book (and I rarely do), and I thought the writing was lazy. The ending felt really rushed, like 19/20 of the book were buildup to one kind of strange 1/20. Everyone else seemed to love this book, so YMMV. Maybe it was a little too close to home.
Wow, I hope everything is going ok for you now, I can’t imagine how weird it would be to read a book about events that are mirroring your life so closely.
The repetitive use of ochre would have bugged me too especially since ochre is an intense red orange (think the colour of Ayres Rock) and I’m pretty sure it’s physiologically impossible to have a bruise that colour. Maybe the author just thought the word sounded cool?
I haven’t read this one, but I read her other one, The Good Girl, and plot facts aside, this sounds exactly the same. Terrible, unlikable characters, overly complicated plot and a twist telegraphed a mile away. It was hog wash.