Well, I wasn’t expecting that (or at least not all of it). I think I was holding my breath the whole last half of the book.

I’m going to be vague here because it’s good to read this book knowing as little about it as possible. There are several reveals as we learn about the main character’s life – some very surprising and some anticipated – but I’ll leave you to find them out on your own read. It’s mixed too on which ones are surprising and which you see coming – there was one I guessed right from the beginning that some book club members thought was a huge reveal, but since it only came about a third of the way through the book, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

In general terms though, this book is about family and each of the character’s build their life around their families in different ways. As we listen to Evelyn’s life story, it also allows for others to come to realizations in their own lives, a way of seeing things differently. One of my favourite moments of dialogue was when one of the characters talks about divorce, “I wasn’t heartbroken. I simply felt that my marriage had failed. And those are very different things.” There’s also a lot of talk about sex and sexuality – our main character doesn’t shy away from this – and how this is conflated with intimacy; some interesting points for discussion here.

My issue with the story is more with a particular character, and maybe we’re supposed to not agree with them but they never get ‘put in their place’ so to speak so it’s hard to say what the author’s intention is. Again being very vague, this character is presented as almost perfect but they get very angry and jealous, and don’t respect other characters’ sexualities. They get to win the arguments each time so it just left a bad taste in my mouth that these attitudes were always awarded as being ‘right’.