The Loverlys’ young son is in a coma after falling from his bedroom window and his mother Whitney waits by his bedside without a word to anyone. Back in their neighborhood, their neighbors and friends are shocked and reeling from their different roles in this. As the author takes us back to the weeks before the accident and the intricate ways the different families are connected, a domestic drama plays out right in front of us.
I loved Audrain’s debut novel – The Push. I gave it 5 stars. It was so well written and I was so intrigued. Her second book does not live up to her debut novel. I know the publishers are selling this as a domestic thriller but I refused to call it that in my blurb above, this is a domestic drama at best. There is no thriller. From the 20% mark you already know exactly what is happening and what secrets the author is stretching out to reveal at the 90% mark and it is not worth your reading 300 pages to get to.
Audrain is a fantastic writer. I’ll give her that. Every sentence is well crafted but my problem with this book is that this is not a story worth telling. This book is told from different points of views of the women living in the neighborhood. There are too many points of views and one in particular is so unnecessary and the editor should have cut it – Mara. Mara is an elderly portuguese woman who is the last of her kind in a neighborhood that has been utterly gentrified by the rich. She sits on her porch and observes her neighbors. I think she added nothing to the story. Her backstory did nothing to move the plot forward. You could skip all her chapters except one and you’d still not have missed a thing.
This book explores the quiet sacrifices of motherhood. We see Blair, a mother who has given up everything to be a stay at home mother to her one child. In contrast to Whitney who puts her career over the needs of her children. Then finally, Rebecca, a woman who has had 5 miscarriages and is desperate to become a mother. While Audrain has a lot of astute observations about motherhood, it ultimately amounts to nothing. There is no lesson to be learnt here. Nobody wins.
Audrain writes these long paragraphs about miscarriages that I had to skim through. The way she explicitly writes about the foetus leaving your body and describes each one of the 5 miscarriages in gruesome details made me feel like this is extremely unnecessary. But I also understand that maybe I’m not the target audience and people who have actually had miscarriages might relate to the very detailed passages about feeling the clumps drop down in the toilet as the contractions grip you?
As we get to know Rebecca, Whitney, Blair and Mara, the author explores the decisions every woman makes and the judgement and guilt that follows. She shows the lives we choose, the ones we’re thrust into and the different ways we punish ourselves for those decisions.
Ultimately, while I went around proclaiming the amazingness of The Push, I’m afraid I won’t be doing that for this one. Audrain is a fantastic writer but I wish she had sat with this one a little while longer. I gave this 2 stars on Goodreads.
Leggy
TwoNightStands 