Truly Madly Guilty, by Liane Moriarty

6 adults, 3 children, 1 barbecue. Add copious alcohol, a creepy neighbor with a sad past, a terrible accident and you've got a recipe for a slow-burning Australian drama. This reminds me of Herman Koch's "The Dinner", where the adults reunite after The Incident and their relationship is clearly strained due to the elephant in the room. Secrets slowly simmer at the surface, true motivations are added to the mix, and The Incident is the catalyst in boiling everything over. I'll stop at the cooking puns now - basically, I recommend this book if you want to hate all the characters and sit back and grin at the schadenfreude that's about to occur. Warning: no one is likable (except maybe Vid). Clementine is a drama-mama par excellence. Clementine's child Holly is an absolute terror and just reading about her epic tantrums is quite effective birth control. Erika is intensely needy and obsessive in judging yet coveting Clementine and Holly's relationship. The book is not really about The Incident, but actually about the psychology behind all the characters and why they continue to engage each other.

Rating: 4/5. 3 stars for plot, but elevating to a 4 because of the character development and extensive research on the cello. She really nailed down audition life and the stress/perfectionism involved. She even researched the Alexander Technique, so color me impressed! (so yeah, +1 for bias from a fellow cellist)