It All Comes Down to This
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
A JUNE INDIE NEXT PICK "A smart and lively novel." —Jess Walter, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins "Austenesque...this goes down as easily as an Aperol spritz." —Publishers Weekly With her keen eye for human foibles and emotional truth, humor and deep feeling, acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Therese Anne Fowler delivers a stylish, insightful take on the dysfunctional family dramedy. Meet the Geller sisters: Beck, Claire, and Sophie, a trio of strong-minded women whose pragmatic mother, Marti, will be dying soon. Beck, the eldest, is a freelance journalist whose marriage has long been devoid of passion, and she's recently begun to suspect that her husband, Paul, is hiding something from her. Though middle sister Claire is an accomplished pediatric cardiologist, her own heart is a mess, and her unrequited love for the wrong man is slowly destroying her. And while Sophie, the youngest, appears to have an Instagram-ready life of glamorous work and travel, her true existence is a cash-strapped house of cards that may fall at any moment. But Marti’s will surprises them with its provision that the family’s summer cottage in Maine must be sold, the proceeds split equally between the three sisters. While there’s a ready buyer in C.J. Reynolds, he’s an ex-con with a complicated past and a tangled history with one of the women. Choices and consequences, mistakes and misapprehensions, obligations and desires: before long, everyone in this cast of indelible characters will have to come to terms with the ways their lives have turned out differently than they expected, as well as the secrets they’ve been keeping from each other––and themselves.
Reviews with the most likes.
Well-written book with a pat ending that was lovely but (in my opinion) far-fetched to the point of absurdity.
Overall, I found the characters compelling and I was intrigued by their stories, but I felt this book - in large part because of how it ended - to be a little too “shiny”. I preferred ‘A Good Neighborhood' - but I would recommend this for anyone looking for a chicken-soup-for-the-soul-esque novel.
Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the ARC.
This book about family secrets, sisterhood, and missed chances really struck a chord with me. While I most identified with Beck, I did find the other two sisters (Claire and Sophie) interesting in their own ways as well. In particular, I hadn't ever seen an examination of what it's like to be a “influencer-adjacent” like Sophie, who survives through her friendships and connections with famous friends, but has accomplished little on her own and wound up seriously in debt. When their mother dies and leaves the old famous home in Maine to the girls to sell off, it causes ripples throughout all three lives they didn't see coming. If you're a fan of intricately-woven family dynamics, you should enjoy this one. The writing is well-done, as we've come to expect from Fowler who has established her bonafides with best sellers in the past. While the plot did get lost a bit in the middle and began to meander, it ultimately came together in the end in a satisfying way.
Nothing Technically Wrong, Yet SLOW. This is one of those books where there is nothing technically blatantly wrong about the storytelling... and yet the reader is left with the sense that this story could have been so much more engaging had it been told differently. To the level that while this book is around the 350 page mark, it almost reads as though it is a dense academic tome of twice its length - even though it very clearly is not. As other reviewers have noted, there are a LOT of characters to keep up with early, but that does in fact get easier probably by even the 25 - 33% mark, once we've visited each a couple of times and get a sense of where their individual arcs are. In the end, this is a solid slice of life family drama that touches on very real and very messy issues, but could have been better told in this format with several dozen fewer pages (to speed the pacing) or with this number of pages in a different format. Still, as noted, there is nothing technically wrong here and other readers may have a better time with this book. Recommended.
