Thank you Macmillan Audio for the ALC and St. Martin’s Press/Netgalley #partner, for the advanced copy of It All Comes Down To This in exchange for my honest review.
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press / Macmillan Audio
Published: June 7, 2022
Summary:
Therese Anne Fowler’s It All Comes Down to This is a warm, keenly perceptive novel of sisterhood, heartbreak, home, and what it takes to remake a life at its halfway point, for fans of Ann Patchett and Emma Straub.
Meet the Geller sisters: Beck, Claire, and Sophie, a trio of strong-minded women whose pragmatic, widowed mother, Marti, will be dying soon and taking her secrets with her. Marti has ensured that her modest estate is easy for her family to deal with once she’s gone—including a provision that the family’s summer cottage on Mount Desert Island, Maine, must be sold, the proceeds split equally between the three girls.
Beck, the eldest, is a freelance journalist whose marriage looks more like a sibling bond than a passionate partnership. In fact, her husband Paul is hiding a troubling truth about his love life. For Beck, the Maine cottage has been essential to her secret wish to write a novel—and to remake the terms of her relationship.
Despite her accomplishments as a pediatric cardiologist, Claire, the middle daughter, has always felt like the Geller misfit. Recently divorced, Claire’s secret unrequited love for the wrong man is slowly destroying her, and she’s finding that her expertise on matters of the heart unfortunately doesn’t extend to her own.
Youngest daughter Sophie appears to live an Instagram-ready life, filled with glamorous work and travel, celebrities, fashion, art, and sex. In reality, her existence is a cash-strapped house of cards that may crash at any moment.
Enter C.J. Reynolds, an enigmatic Southerner ex-con with his own hidden past, who complicates the situation. All is not what it seems, and everything is about to change.
My thoughts:
I fell in love with Theresa Anne Fowler’s writing with her last two books, A Well-Behaved Woman and A Good Neighborhood. When I saw she had a new book coming out, I jumped at the opportunity to read it…and was luckily enough to not only get a print copy but also an audio version, too.
I love family dramas…I think coming from a large family, I just appreciate reading about messy, complicated families and so when I saw that that was what this was, I was excited. But…this doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s really just a character study of three sisters who have very complicated relationships with each other, and truth be told I had a really hard time connecting to any of the characters, and therefore wasn’t fully invested in what was going on with them. This made it a little more challenging to really focus on the book. It’s not a bad book – it’s full of all the things I usually love – family secrets and lies – but I just felt like it dragged at times.
I didn’t not like the book, I just didn’t love it as much as I expected to, but I will still be eager to see what this author writes next and I still plan on reading from her backlist – I know she wrote a book about Zelda that I’ve been meaning to read for quite some time.
Audio thoughts:
Barrie Kreinik narrated this book and to be honest, I think she kept me from putting this one down. I love the way she narrates and she did a great job bringing this story to life. Her pacing was good and even though this book was a bit on the longer side, her voice made it all the more enjoyable!
