Every Last One

Title: Every Last One
Author: Anna Quindlen
Pub Date: 2010
Genre: Fiction
Nutshell: A woman, her family, and what happens to her after something awful occurs

No spoilers, but if you can't figure out that something bad happens at some point in this book, we need to talk about your reading comprehension skills. It's mentioned on the book jacket. The only surprising thing for me was the exact nature of what happened and how long it took to happen. I don't necessarily think this was a failure on the author's part -- a failure of Foreshadowing 101 or anything, but it did get to be a bit grinding by the time the denouement finally occurred. You know from the book jacket that something bad is going to happen, and then within the first few chapters, you would get that sense even if you weren't the type that reads book jackets. And then it just keeps going. There's a Sword of Damocles hanging over the entire thing that nobody seems to see except the reader, and for me it just got wearisome. I don't know if it would have helped not saying anything about it on the book jacket and just letting you kind of read for yourself with no expectations, but it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly that something is not right and, already provided with the information that something is going to happen, you're kind of set up with the expectation. 

So I don't know whose fault that was, but it kind of soured this whole experience for me. I never really felt connected with any of the characters--I couldn't even keep secondary character names straight, and there's not that many. I couldn't find anyone necessarily to really like or hang on to. Maybe that wasn't the point. Everyone is believable enough as real people. The writing is good. I just never fell into this book the way I do with something I really connect with. This was just something I read and said, "Okay, that was technically proficient and I didn't hate it." Maybe others will have better luck.

Plotwise, this is the story of a wife and mother who has three teenage children. The children have friends, the couple has friends and jobs, everything is fine, until one night everything becomes very much not fine, and then the rest of the book is the main character navigating the wreckage left behind. That's all I'll give you, because that much more or less exists everywhere including the book descriptions on Goodreads and Amazon.