I admit I came to enjoy this easy read. The exploration of a marriage on hiatus and how that break affects the couple individually, their extended family, plus their network of friends, is both contemporary and relevant. The Irish setting with regular spells in London pleased me, as did the scope the novelist gave the minor characters.
I found the novel slow-going at first and a bit too long. A lot of whining by Amy as she attempts to change her husband Hugh’s mind almost turned me off. The pace picks up as she navigates and moves from disbelief and desperation at her abandonment to ultimate acceptance that, in spite of him saying he loves her and her professing her love for him, he might not come back.
Spoiler alert: Hugh does return, hoping to find Amy as loving as he left her, but she has seen a photo of him in another woman’s bed on the other side of the world and embarked on her own affair. Amy rejects Hugh even as she ultimately rejects her new lover.
There are the obligatory scenes of coupling, nothing new there, but plot twists show how resilient she has had to become to shepherd her complicated family through the break and other mega challenges.
Spoiler alert again: What ultimately made the book worth reading? How the author captures the roller-coaster process of learning to forgive. Even though the ending struck me as somewhat pat, I felt relief that, even in today’s fraught-with-anxiety climate, a novel with a happy ending still sells. RATING: 6.5/10