Sunday, April 27, 2014

You Should Have Known

Jean Hanff Korelitz

Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things: she lives in the very New York apartment in which she was raised, and sends Henry to the school she herself once attended. Dismayed by the ways in which women delude themselves, Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them. But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself.(from Netgalley)

My Thoughts

Grace Sachs is a therapist who counsels couples and individuals who are struggling with relationships. She doesn’t sugar coat anything with her clients and frequently let’s them know that there signs that their relationship were doomed from the very beginning. Her first “relationship” book, called You Should Have Known, is about to hit the bookshelves. She is married and has one son. When a mother from het son’s school is murdered and her husband disappears, Grace begins to wonder if she should have heeded her own advice.

The first half of this story was mostly narrative and I can sometimes struggle with this. But it occurred to me that we need this so the we could truly understand Grace. We need to know what her life was like, who her acquiantances are, and how she see the world so we can understand what she is losing as her world falls apart. The second half of the story is where the action really picks up. Is there a connection between the murder woman and her missing husband?
 
I really did enjoy this book. I thought it was quite the page turner. The author did a great job of building suspense. This is the first book I’ve read by Ms. Korelitz, but it will not be my last.

Thanks to grand Central Publishing, via Netgalley, for allowing me to read this in exchange for an unbiased review.

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