Book Notices | The Perfect Marriage by Adam Mitzner / Almost by Elizabeth Benedict

Adam Mitzner, The Perfect Marriage

Amazon   This story has sort of a strange arc. Jessica and James are happily celebrating their first anniversary, but their "perfect marriage" was built on the backs of two destroyed relationships. Both exes are on the scene and suffering in their own ways from the betrayal of their former spouses, and Jessica's teenaged son is facing a grim medical diagnosis. James, meanwhile, is getting involved in a shady art deal with a sometime associate. So there's all that backstory, which goes on for more than a third of the book, and then suddenly everything changes: one of the characters is found dead, and now we're in the middle of a police procedural. Then it turns into a legal story and we watch the initial proceedings against the accused in some detail until, ultimately, the story rolls to an unsatisfying, unsurprising conclusion. It's not an awful book, but it doesn't make me eager to read more from this author.

Elizabeth Benedict, Almost

Amazon   Well, this was a lovely book. Narrator Sophy Chase is almost divorced when she finds out that her husband, Will, has died. She leaves her new boyfriend to fly back to Swansea, an island off of Massachusetts, to deal with things—her grief, her guilt, her stepdaughters, the funeral, the dog she left behind when she left. Sophy's desperate for answers about Will's sudden death, but there aren't any firm conclusions on offer here. That's the beauty of the book: It eschews Hallmark Channel certainty for ambiguity and moral grays. By the end of the story, after the funeral and a couple of other dramas piled on top of it, Sophy's character has moved forward in her life, but it's a subtle shift only, to a subtly better place. It's not a Hallmark ending, that is, but a realistic one.