Bookish Thoughts

I thought this was one of Moriarty's better books. Not quite at the level of Big Little Lies  or What Alice Forgot , but miles ahead of The Husband's Secret . At this point, she's pretty much cemented herself as one of my go-to authors. When I'm in the mood for a page-turner with complicated characters and a bit of a mystery, she's a fairly consistent choice. This book follows Ellen, a hypnotherapist who has just started dating someone new. When he tells her that his ex-girlfriend is stalking him, she finds herself more intrigued than off-put. She's fascinated by what would lead someone to that sort of behavior. Little does she know that the stalker is masquerading as one of her patients. This book definitely kept me interested. From the outset it was a little obvious how it would all turn out - Moriarty is a fan of the happy ending - but it was still a fun journey to go on. The ending was perhaps a bit too perfect. Every single detail worked out for the bes...

Liane Moriarty is great when I want a quick-plotted, entertaining read. She creates incredibly detailed, flawed characters who balance the line of "people I never want to meet" and "people I can unfortunately relate to somehow". She places them in difficult situations and watches everything unravel. And then she tries to tie everything up in the happiest ending possible. Sometimes this works, other times it comes across as trite or manipulative. This book focuses on three couples who attend a BBQ where Something Bad happens. The first half of the book is devoted to teasing out what that Something Bad is while everyone copes (or fails to cope) with the aftermath. The book alternates between the day of the BBQ (starting early in the morning, well before anything has happened), and the fallout a few months later. Moriarty does this to tease out her big reveal for as long as possible. The problem is that she goes on a bit too long. The first half of the book really ...

Liane Moriarty has a gift for writing incredibly readable books about complicated, interesting characters in difficult circumstances. I fly through her books - they always seem half as long as they actually are - but I end up with a ton to think about afterwards. If this is "chick lit", then I'm ashamed to have shunned the genre for so long. What Alice Forgot  is my favorite of her books so far. The story follows Alice Love, who collapses at the gym and loses ten years of her life. She wakes up believing that she's twenty-nine years old, she and her husband are renovating their dream house, and she's pregnant with their first kid. Life is wonderful and full of possibilities. Unfortunately, none of that is true. Alice is confronted by a series of shocks. She has three children, all school-aged. Her mother has remarried and her sister is barely speaking to her. Worst of all, she and her husband are in the midst of a messy divorce. And no one can provide her with...

There's a lot to like about Liane Morairty. She writes these compulsively readable books about complicated women making difficult choices. I'm a little bit in awe of the way she balances that dark complexity with her breezy style. Her books feel half as long as they actually are because I read them so quickly. The Husband's Secret  is about the fallout after a wife discovers a terrible secret that her husband has been keeping from her for as long as they've known each other. Her perfectly ordered world starts to crumble as she tries to figure out what to do with her knowledge. And the longer she waits to make a decision, the harder it becomes to do anything at all. Her story intersects with that of two other women. One is the elderly secretary at her daughters' primary school who lost her own daughter thirty years previously. The other is another mom who is in town ostensibly to help out her injured mother but is really fleeing from the news that her husband has...

It's always interesting when a story gets as much hype as Big Little Lies  has over the past year. There's always a chance that it won't live up to it. Then again, these things are often receiving all that attention for a reason, and they're usually worth checking out. The trick is to time it so that you're expectations match up with reality. This time, it worked. I loved this book. I read it so much faster than I expected to, partly because I couldn't put it down and partly because it was just that easy to read. The story opens as a murder mystery, but the mystery is doubled. Not only do you not know who the killer is, you don't know who the victim is. The book then rewinds six months to plot out all the events leading up to the murder. Full disclosure: I went into this book knowing who would die. I had a pretty good idea who the killer was (I ended up being wrong, actually). But that didn't detract from the experience at all. On the contrary, the a...