Cannonballers love Liane Moriarty, and they really love Big Little Lies. I could no longer hold out against the deluge of positive reviews and the upcoming HBO series produced by Reese Witherspoon who has a history of putting her money behind female driven projects.
Hot take: It is quite good, but I was able to call all the big twists save one. Read it before the HBO series arrives in late February if you want to be a smug book reader.
More in depth review to make MsWas happy:
Big Little Lies is told from the point of view of three different characters, all moms to the incoming kindergarten class: Madeline, Jane, and Celeste. 
Each is at a different place in her life, a different stage, and each has a BIG thing they are dealing with during school year. Big Little Lies is also, however, a carefully plotted look at bullying amongst children and adults. Finally, Big Little Lies is mystery about the unraveling of a death at a school function.
It doesn’t sound as good in blurb form as it is in execution, no matter how much I play with it.
The characters, even the ones who only appear in end of chapter pull quotes from the interviews (and what an awesome way to include further character point of views and conflicting information), are all designed to pull you in, and they do the trick. In theory I shouldn’t have wanted to skip other things I’m doing in order to work through 460 pages of bullying, domestic violence, divorce and second family politics, but I did.
As I said above, I really enjoyed this book, and the workmanship Moriarty has on display in it. I’m going to leave off here, and keep this review rather vague, because I want you (for the dozens who still haven’t read it) to go in clean, like Station Eleven, I feel like that’s the best plan.
Funny how we posted on the same day! I’m not likely to see the mini-series since we don’t subscribe to HBO, so I’m glad to have read the book. I didn’t picture the characters as the actresses in the roles though – Shailene Woodley seems more of a Bonnie, and Reese more like Celeste to me.
Because I am planning to watch the miniseries, I opened up imdb so that I could get used to these ladies as their characters. There are some switches from the book, Bonnie being played by Zoe Kravitz, and apparently the principal will be a man (I don’t see why that change was necessary), but generally I am okay with Reese as Madeline and Nicole as Celeste. Those make sense to me as a pair.