The Husband's Secret, by Liane Moriarty

Yesterday, I forgot that I had signed up for a the Minneapolis Books and Bars August book club meetup. Upon checking my calendar, I realized that the meetup was scheduled for the very next day.  Whoops!

I love my Kindle Fire and I love the convenience of buying a book so quickly with a tap of the finger!  As soon as I got home from work, I made some tea, stepped out onto the balcony, and lit a citronella candle to ward off the crazy mosquitos during this hot and humid season.  I ended up finishing the book in a few hours, racing to get to the end.

I feel like even without a deadline, I would have finished it fairly quickly.  It was a fast read and the plot moved along at a pretty good pace.  The book triangulates around three different families: Cecilia + John Paul, Tess + William + Felicity, and Rachel + Janie.  Cecilia is a sweet and devoted wife to John Paul but then discovers a secret letter in a shoebox, to be opened and read upon John Paul's death (spoiler but not really: she reads it). Though the secret was predictable, it was still terrible to add two and two and think of The Secret's repercussions.  The other two families have their own issues involving their own secrets, but I won't bring them up because they are pretty spoilerish. 

I initially thought that it would be confusing to keep track of all the characters since it seemed like all three plot lines were unrelated, but Liane Moriarty brings them together and helps you connect the dots with ease.  You follow three stories that run parallel to each other, and then the plot lines intersect and become blurred when you realize that it's a small world and everyone is connected to The Secret. While the story started off slowly, the pace picked up; by the time I was at the last quarter of the book, I was speed-reading because everyone's carefully constructed cover was about to get blown over and I wanted to race over and see the inevitable car wreck of an ending (see what I did there...no?...read the book, then get back to me).  I wanted to "love" this book, but I ended up just "liking" it because the epilogue was too much and I wasn't happy with how the author wrote it off as "welp, we'll just call things even, the end". But I still liked it, so you should read it and tell me what you think. On a scale of MUST BUY NOW and NEVER READ THIS THING, it's a 'meh, wait til you spot it at the library and check it out'.