Ooooh! This is delicious ChickLit and a compelling page-turner with a multilayered plot line, well-developed characters, and (of course!) big secrets. Really, really big secrets from two husbands.
Written by Liane Moriarty, this is the story of three women living in Sydney,
…more Australia, who barely know each other when the book begins but whose stories intertwine in surprising and heartbreaking ways:
• Cecilia Fitzpatrick is the happily married mother of three girls, Isabel, Esther, and Polly. Her husband, John-Paul, is successful and very (very!) good looking. Cecilia is the mastermind of organization, running her household and a lucrative Tupperware business. One day when John-Paul is on a business trip in New York City, she finds a sealed letter he wrote years ago addressed to her. On the front of the envelope it says: "To be opened only in the event of my death." Of course, she opens it even though John-Paul is alive and well. And life will never ever be the same again.
• Tess O'Leary is married to Will, and along with her cousin/best friend Felicity the three run a successful marketing/advertising company in Melbourne. Tess and Will have a six-year-old boy named Liam. Life is wonderful until one evening when Will and Felicity confront Tess with a shocking tale. She flees with Liam to her mother's home in Sydney.
• Rachel Crowley is a widowed grandmother, who dotes on her only grandchild, two-year-old Jacob. She and her husband had two children, but their daughter, Janie, was brutally murdered when she was 17, and Rachel has never recovered or stopped grieving. The case was never solved. Now her son and daughter-in-law are moving to New York, which will leave a giant hole in Rachel's heart when they take little Jacob with them. Rachel harbors a deep-seated anger that is nearly destroying her, especially because she thinks she knows who murdered her daughter.
The writing is light and breezy—just like ChickLit should be—until the major twists and turns in the plot give a real jolt and turn it into a kind of thriller. This is where it gets serious, and Liane Moriarty proves her writing chops as she tackles difficult topics, including marital infidelity, moral responsibilities, and troublesome ethical questions. Themes of betrayal, guilt, grief, and eventual forgiveness are laced throughout the novel.
This is a book that forces the reader to think, to put herself in the place of the characters and answer the almost unanswerable questions with which they are living.
Bonus: There are many spot-on pieces of life advice sprinkled throughout the novel. (less)
Power Reviewer
