Book #114: The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty

This book starts out with Cecilia, one of the main characters in the novel, finding a letter her husband wrote to her "to be opened only in the event of his death." In it, he reveals his deepest, darkest secret which she had never before suspected, which immediately changes everything in their relationship. (I don't want to be totally spoiling everything by giving it all away and telling what the secret is, but if you read it and can start to put together the pieces of the puzzle it'll be pretty obvious pretty quickly.) The story also follows Rachel, an older woman whose daughter was murdered thirty years before, and Tess, who found out that her husband and her best friend have fallen in love with each other and they want to live together. This book is really about all of their relationships with each other and how they all can learn to forgive each other and themselves for things they've done.

I read What Alice Forgot earlier this year and really enjoyed it--more than I thought I would. It wasn't necessarily my favorite book in the world, but Moriarty has an awesome skill at the inner dialogue of characters and giving them such funny thoughts and voices. That skill really plays out in this book--I really liked all of the three main characters' thoughts and ideas in their heads. They say and think things that are so funny and real, and I liked how they even were thinking terrible, mean things that we would never say out loud, and learning things about themselves as they did it. I felt like Tess's storyline, about learning about her husband's almost-infidelity, was my least favorite, and it really didn't have anything to do with the rest of the book. You could have taken her out of the book altogether and it would have gotten along just fine. I just hate hearing about people cheating on each other, and that seemed terrible. I also felt like the ending, where Moriarty lays out all of these alternative endings/scenarios, was a little weird and almost depressing. The main strength of this book definitely lies with Moriarty's ability to write such believable, realistic, and funny characters, which was my favorite part.