Another Novel Read | BookLikes

I won this book in a giveaway on Goodreads, and by the time I started reading it, I’d completely forgotten what it was about or why I had entered the giveaway. As I started reading, however, I was quickly reminded of the why: this book deals with marriage, divorce, and the struggles therein. As a woman who has been divorced, and is now married (I hate saying “remarried”), this book caught my eye.“I used to imagine it sometimes, what would happen if one day I just didn’t come home.“…it was always me I imagined suddenly missing. I never imagined finding anyone else’s pill bottles or the slippers that had formed to their feet, now ditched under the bed. I didn’t think about discovering someone else’s breakfast dishes or the change from their pocket left out on the dresser, their presence sitting right next to their absence.”Let me say: the writing is lovely. I stopped several times while reading to make note of some of the beautiful passages, and statements that were so true, that I didn’t want to forget. As an exploration of being a wife, I thought that this book did very well. However, I wasn’t able to relate to this story as wholly as I had hoped.Much of the book deals with infidelity, and no matter how much Dani tried to justify it in her mind (and no matter how much guilt she actually felt over it), I just couldn’t relate. And since the whole story is wrapped up in thoughts surrounding this, I found myself struggling to keep reading sometimes.In addition, the story just moved slowly. The investigation was dragged out and so much of the book was spent inside Dani’s mind that I kept losing interest. I do think that this is probably a realistic account, at least from Dani’s point of view, but I wish we had gotten to see more beyond that. The way the investigation was handled also really bothered me, because it just seemed too minimal or something. And when the Big Reveal happened, I was disappointed because it was what I had suspected from the very beginning.“Blessed books — they’re a place to be alone, and no one else can come in.”Alas, this book didn’t live up to my hopes, but it was okay, and I did enjoy some parts of it.