The Last Mrs. Parrish

Where did you get it? Purchased in-store at Barnes & Noble.

Why did you read it? My friend is a retired school teacher and she is in a book club for the first time in her life. She lives across the country but we text a lot. She mentioned her new book club was reading this next and after reading about it I decided to read it too so we could discuss it. We were going to keep pace with each other and read it “together” but that’s not what happened… I bought it and read it in two sittings. She doesn’t even have it yet!  I probably shouldn’t do read-alongs, haha.

What’s it about? It’s about a woman, Amber Patterson, who feels she deserves more than what life has handed her and sets out to take what she feels entitled to from a fabulously wealthy couple, Daphne and Jackson Parrish. The book is broken into two parts and the first part is told from the point of view of Amber. She befriends Daphne and bonds with her through a shared, sad life experience, and soon she is joining in on family functions, committee meetings, holidays, extravagant trips. Daphne feels like she has found a soulmate, almost a sister, in Amber, and before long she is her closest friend and confidante. But Daphne is being set up, and you know it right from the beginning. Amber is scheming and plotting, and the reader is privy to all of her ugly thoughts about the Parrish’s and their daughters. Her manipulation of Daphne makes for tense reading. She is after Jackson and nothing will stop her. It’s all so easy and she’s determined to get what she wants. Part ll is told from Daphne’s point of view. The insider perspective on the Parrish marriage and lifestyle is much different, and what is behind the curtain of wealth and privilege is awful and ugly. Everything you thought you knew from Part 1 is turned upside down.

What did you like?  This book is super entertaining. If you like reading how the 1% live, you’ll like the first part of the book. Think champagne wishes and cavier dreams. It’s fast paced and binge-worthy. Amber is an envious bitch, and I marveled at her ability to act kind and caring while thinking outrageously mean thoughts. I was afraid for Daphne through the entire first part of the book. Daphne is the textbook-perfect wife, but appearances are deceiving. Jackson is.. holy crap, he is not as he seems. Fabulously wealthy, gorgeous, powerful, generous. And also sick, abusive, vindictive. Thankfully, all these flawed humans get the life they deserve in the end.

What didn’t work for you?   I saw the “twist” coming a mile away, but that didn’t detract too much from the reading experience. I found Part ll a little repetitive, but overall I really enjoyed the book.

Share a quote or two:  

“Everything had begun with such promise. And then, like a windshield chipped by a tiny pebble, the chip turned into deep cracks that spread until there was nothing left to repair.”

“His weapons were kindness, attention, and compassion—and when victory was assured, he discarded them like spent casings, and his true nature emerged.”

Who would enjoy this book?  Readers who enjoy a peek into a completely different lifestyle, and those who appreciate women’s fiction and suspense. I don’t think I’d go so far as to call this a thriller or a crime story. I also wouldn’t call it a romance even though there was a good bit of sex. It’s pretty dark.

Anything else to add?  The author, Liv Constantine, is actually a pen name for a writing duo, sisters Lynne and Valerie Constantine. The novel was a Reese Witherspoon book club pick, and is being adapted as a TV series by Amazon. I think it’ll work really well on the small screen. While I was reading it I was often reminded of the 2018 movie A Simple Favor. It has a lot of the same ingredients: fabulous wealth, deception, power.

HAVE YOU READ The Last Mrs. Parrish? Did you like it? Would you recommend it? Leave me a note in the comments.

Will these first sentences be enough to entice you to add them to your TBR list? They were for me!

Author Claire King writes:

“Maman’s belly is at the stove, her bottom squeezed up against the table where we are colouring.”  Claire King, The Night Rainbow

As a reader I expect a lot from the opening sentence. Like the opening bars of a song, it’s the signature of the story, more so than the ending. When you meet someone, your first impression is often visual, but when you meet a new narrator it’s the first thing they say and how they say it. So as a writer, in both short stories and in novels, I feel I owe the reader an engaging start.

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I can’t write the first sentence of any story until I am almost finished. The narrator must have found her voice, and I need to be clear where the story ends to know how it must begin. In the opening of The Night Rainbow I wanted the reader to meet Pea – the narrator – and her sister, to understand that they are children, and to know what is troubling Pea most. It took me three sentences to set that out, but the first sentence goes a long way towards it, and the first word of all is the biggest clue: Maman.

Author Amy Sue Nathan writes:

“Evie picked up a small, silver-framed photo and wiped away invisible dust. ” Amy Sue Nathan, THE GLASS WIVES – A Novel

Will these first sentences be enough to entice you to add them to your TBR list? They were for me!

Author Amy Shearn writes:

“Before I died the first time, my husband left me broke and alone with our two tiny children and it made me feel very depressed, etc.”  Amy Shearn, The Mermaid of Brooklyn

I thought about this book for a long time in an inchoate way before I actually started writing. But when I did sit down and begin – boom – there was the first sentence. This sentence made everything about the book possible for me. It includes the three main projects of the book: the impossible and slightly magical – died the first time? – the terribleness of the mundane – husband left, broke, depressed – and to me, the “etc” makes it funny. You know immediately (I hope) that you are in the hands of an irreverent, slightly glib, possibly unreliable narrator.

This sentence is probably the only one in the book that never changed in my many revisions. I hope it sucks readers in. I love first sentences. I love first thirds of novels, actually. I just realized that about myself as a reader, that I love every first third of every novel I can remember reading. Maybe everyone’s like that. Because writing the first third of a novel well is, I think, pretty easy. It’s the ending that’s hard. But when I wrote this first sentence I also had the last sentence in mind, so that made working my way through the book vastly more doable.  I recommend that to anyone trying to write a book, and I’m including myself in that category as I embark on my next one – write the first and last sentences at the same time.

Author Jael McHenry writes:

Will these first sentences be enough to entice you to add them to your TBR list? They were for me!

Author D. E. Johnson writes:

First sentence: “The first part of the body I saw was half of the left arm.” D. E. Johnson, The Detroit Electric Scheme

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You can write the most brilliant book in history, but if the first sentence is a snoozer, it’s unlikely anyone will ever know about it.

Author Peggy Hesketh writes:

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Will these first sentences be enough to entice you to add them to your TBR list? They were for me!

Author Henriette Laridis Power writes:

First sentence of THE CLOVER HOUSE:  

Title:

Publisher: Gallery Books; Reprint edition (July 17, 2012)

Pages:  320 pages

Genre:  contemporary women’s fiction

Where did you get it? Purchased in-store at Barnes & Noble.

Why did you read it? My book club chose it for discussion.

What’s it about?  This is a mother/daughter story.  Cam is a single mom raising teenaged Aubrey on her own since her husband left to join a cult.  She has Aubrey’s life pretty well figured out; Aubrey will attend a fantastic liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest, right after her 18th birthday, when she claims the trust fund arranged for her by her father.  But Aubrey has seemingly lost her mind in her senior year of high school.  Once a college bound straight A student and band geek, she’s met a boy and suddenly quit band.    She doesn’t  have any interest in her mother’s plans; the same plans she’s been going along with for years up until now.  Mother and daughter are no longer close and fail to see the other’s point of view.

What did you like?  There was a lot to like!  The book is witty and fun, insightful and smart.   Having two moody teenaged daughters of my own, I could really relate to Cam.  Cam had so many hopes and dreams for Aubrey and just wanted what was best for her.  And that feeling of your child becoming a stranger to you was sadly all too familiar… the feeling of, “Where did I go wrong?”  And how everything you say somehow gets misunderstood.  Yeah, that’s my life.  But having been a teenaged girl once, I could also relate to Aubrey’s feelings of wanting to please her mom, but also wanting her mom to butt out and let her live her life.  I read a lot of lines out loud to my daughter and we laughed a lot.

The story is told in alternating chapters by Cam and Aubrey.  I loved being able to “hear” their distinct voices and really understand where they were coming from.  Cam’s chapters are all in the present, but Aubrey’s reach into the past to give us the backstory.  It wasn’t typical and I liked this approach.

What didn’t work for you?   This is a small thing but at times there was an overabundance of adjectives.  Whenever I would find a particularly adjective-filled line, I’d email it to my friend so we could share a laugh.  There was a point in the book, maybe 2/3rds in, where I became much more interested in Aubrey’s story, and less interested in Cam’s.  Aubrey, like a lot of teenagers, had this whole secret life going on and I wanted to see what she’d do.  Cam’s ex, Aubrey’s dad, made a reappearance, and I found that storyline much less interesting.  I started skipping over the Cam chapters so that I could read Aubrey’s chapters all in a row.  But I did go back and read Cam’s chapters.  And I don’t think my reading of the book suffered by doing it that way.

Share a quote or two:  

“”When did he take over Aubrey’s life so completely?” I ask, even as I try to figure out when my daughter turned into a stranger.  Six months ago?  No, it’s been longer than that.  In that time, she’s become like a guest forced against her will to live in my house.  A guest who would happily pack up and leave and move in with said boyfriend if I pushed her even the tiniest bit.”

“Forget anthrax.  The greatest chemical threat facing our country today is the hormones delivered to our daughters at puberty.  Hormones that, in Aubrey’s case, were not fully ignited until Tyler appeared.”

Who would enjoy this book?  People who enjoy humorous contemporary fiction, those who like mother/daughter stories, those with older teens who are getting ready to lift their wings and leave the nest.

Who else has reviewed it?  Many bloggers have reviewed this book!  Here are a couple of standouts:

Suko’s Notebook

Raging Bibliomania

Anything else to add?  I really enjoyed this book.  The Gap Year was a good choice for my book club as a lot of us have teen daughters, and mother/daughter struggles are somewhat universal.  We had a lot to talk about.  Highly recommended.

Will these first sentences be enough to entice you to add them to your TBR list? They were for me!

Author Jennie Shortridge writes:.

The first sentence of Love Water Memory is:

“She became aware of a commotion behind her, yet it seemed important to keep scanning, searching for something out over the water, toward low mountains, a skiff of clouds. .”

Author Cari Kamm writes:

So on the advice of my stylist, I did check it out.  And I’ll admit, it was sort of hot at first.  But it was also sort of degrading and stupid and repetitive.  It made me wonder just how this book became so popular, and I think it has little to do with good writing and everything to do with marketing.

We really don’t need a plain brown wrapper for Fifty Shades.  The cover is tame, discreet.  No bodice rippers or entwined bodies in sight.  This, I think, is a huge part of the appeal, legitimizing the genre somehow and making it seem less cliched and old fashioned.

I’d also call it erotica-lite.  FSOG has more of a relationship-focus than porn but more sex than a romance novel.  So it’s ok because, you know, they love each other.  Or something like that.

Book 1 of the FSOG trilogy is now the fastest selling paperback of all time, leaving a bewildered Harry Potter in the dust.  31 million copies of the trilogy have been sold worldwide.  Practically everyone’s read this book; your friends, your sister, your neighbor, the lady sitting in front of you at church.  If you haven’t read it, you’ve heard of it.  Even people who wouldn’t normally read erotica (hi…) want to check it out to see what all the fuss is about.  It’s been hand sold, woman to woman, in person and online over Facebook and Twitter.

Mommy Porn has influenced sales of racy toys and taken reading for pleasure to a whole new level.  It’s an exciting time to be in the business of selling handcuffs. Publishers have rushed to put out erotica titles for the masses, with varying degrees of quality, and covers so subtle they are perfectly acceptable on the book tables at Costco.

What, if anything, does this say about our culture?  Are we sexually frustrated?  Bored?  Oversexed?  Did we need something like Fifty Shades to give us permission to talk about our fantasies with our friends or our partners?  Or is this just pure escapism?

I don’t know, but I couldn’t get past the repetitiveness and the icky relationship between Christian and Ana.  I’m sure there have to be better titles in this genre, which I’ll admit is not without it’s charms *wink wink*.

Suggestions, anyone?

Before I Go To Sleep

Who are we if we don’t have our memories? Ben, the man in the bed, patiently explains, as he does each day, who he is, who she is, what their lives are like.  Ben goes off to work, leaving her to fend for herself until she receives a phone call from Dr. Nash. “You have amnesia,” Dr. Nash explains. “You’ve had amnesia for a long time. You can’t retain new memories, so you’ve forgotten much of what’s happened to you for your entire adult life. Every day you wake up as if you are a young woman. Some days you wake as if you are a child.”

A blank slate every day.  A mind wiped clean.  How did this happen? She meets with Dr. Nash and he has her start a journal, which helps her put her life into context and gives her some continuity from one day to the next.  She begins to remember things; her name (Christine), her husband, Ben.  But nothing is as it seems, and she has the sense that they are hiding things from her.  Nash suggests the journal be kept hidden from Ben, who doesn’t want her seeing a doctor.  Ben is patient with Christine, but also deliberately vague and evasive.  Who can she trust?

Before I Go To Sleep is a well crafted page turner.  I thought I had it figured out a couple of times but it wasn’t until near the end that all the twists and turns came together for me, and because that was great fun, I don’t want to give too much away.  Even though the amnesia concept is a frequent plot device in fiction, I found this book compelling.  We, as readers, experience everything and discover things at the same dreadful and ominous pace as Christine. It is a dark and delicious read. **purchased on the Nook for a book club discussion**