by Jojo Moyes
First sentence: “It was the third time in a week that the air-conditioning had gone out at the Hospital de Clinicas, and the heat was so heavy that the nurses had taken to holding battery-operated plastic fans over the intensive-care patients in an effort to keep them cool.”
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Review copy provided by the publisher.
Content: There’s some swearing, including f-bombs, and some talk of sex. It’s in the Fiction section of the bookstore.

The plot of this is kind of hard to describe. It’s a mother-daughter story — Suzanna has always lived with the shadow of her mother’s flighty-ness; she left Suzanna’s dad and ran off with a salesman, and then died shortly thereafter. And it’s about class — because of her mother, and long memories of the town, Suzanna’s always felt like an outsider in her privileged English family. It’s about relationships and choices: Suzanna’s husband, Nick, has been on her case to have a baby, which she’s not happy about. It’s about friendship: Opening up her “Peacock Emporium” in the small town where she grew up, Suzanna makes a good friend in Jessie, and discovers what it Means To Live. And it’s about new love: Argentinian Alejandro moves to town and Suzanna realizes that maybe she’s been with the wrong man for 10 years.

I didn’t dislike it; I finished it, after all. And Moyes is a good writer. This one kept jumping back and forth in time, which made it kind of difficult to tell ages and time periods, but I didn’t mind it all too much. I didn’t love it, though. I guess nothing happened for most of the book, and then everything came down in the last 100 pages and maybe it felt rushed? I’m not entirely sure. I read this in bits and pieces over several months, which also may have contributed to me not really getting into the book.

Or maybe it’s just that adult fiction, sometimes, just doesn’t do things as well as it could. Not the best book out there, but not the worst either.