Friday, June 2, 2017

Summer Reading: Truly Madly Guilty

The first selection on my summer reading list was Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty. My former book club read Big Little Lies and What Alice Forgot, both of which I really enjoyed, so I was really looking forward to this, Moriarty's latest best-seller. Like these previous novels, Truly Madly Guilty is set present-day suburban Sydney and involves a great deal of foreshadowing before finally revealing the conflict. It centers on three couples: wealthy electrician Vid and his "smoking-hot wife" Tiffany (who used to be an exotic dancer), their neighbors Erika and Oliver who are both accountants, and Erika's childhood best friend, Clementine, a cellist, and her husband Sam. Vid spontaneously invites Erika and Oliver to a barbecue in his backyard and, when Erika reveals that Clementine, Sam, and their two young children are expected at their house for tea, he invites them along as well. Then an incident occurs at the barbecue and the narrative alternates between the night of the barbecue and several weeks later as the couples deal with the aftermath of the incident. All of these characters have issues, to say the least, and the incident at the barbecue bring them all to the forefront of their lives and they all feel a tremendous amount of guilt over what happened. The incident is referred to constantly and information is revealed with brief, and sometimes maddening, little flashes of information about what happened. I must admit that I literally couldn't put this book down, often reading well into the wee hours of the morning, because I had to know what happened at the barbecue. However, unlike Moriarty's previous novels, when the incident is finally revealed, I found it to be utterly anticlimactic and, to be honest, I quickly lost interest in the resolution. I did continue reading and I found the resolution, given the characters' backstories and their traumatic reactions to the incident, to be much too neat and pat. All of the characters are pretty unlikable, which is usual for Moriarty, but this time I didn't find them to be quirky or humorous and I wasn't really invested in what happened to them. This novel was a pretty big disappointment to me and reading it to the end seemed like a chore rather than a pleasure. I would definitely recommend reading Big Little Lies instead.

Have you read Truly Madly Guilty?  What did you think?

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