Apples Never Fall

This was fantastic, it was really well written and researched. An added part of the charm was listening to it being read with an Australian accent.

Characters were well written and I especially liked the sibling relations. Thought the pacing was great.

Things I thought were well researched and written about: tennis, ballet, physiotherapy, migraines, psychology.

I liked how at the end Stan talks about trading using a tennis metaphor.


update March 2024
ooooh a series is being released this month, I think I'll check that out too

I won this book on a giveaway and I am so glad I did. Liane Moriarty weaves the complexities of the relationships between family members into a riveting drama that keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole way through the book. This was my first Liane Moriarty book and I can definitively say it won't be my last! Great read!

What I loved: Liane Moriarty excels at building characters and plots with human and real flaws and dilemmas. Also, there's no stone left unturned: small details are sowed and flourished just in the right time.
What I didn't like: even if that ending was slso sowed, it's exactly a tale from Roald Dahl (well he did it with an elevator but still). Also, it seemed a wee too far fetched to assume all the facts that needed to be aligned for Joy to be gone in such a mystery.

I've had this one on my shelf for a while and finally decided to give it a read. Definitely not what I expected (I didn't read the synopsis), but one I ended up enjoying.

I connected a lot with Joy, as a wife and mother, as well as with her struggles of love, tiredness and balancing. I also really enjoyed the format and the writing of this one. I always love a good past/present storyline and this flowed well.

If you're looking for an emotional, familial drama with a little mystery attached, this is a good one to snag.

I didn't enjoy Apples Never Fall in the same way I enjoyed Big Little Lies—but I did enjoy it. It took at least ten chapters for me to get into this one. There were A LOT of points of view (a bit too many in my opinion) and it took quite a while to develop a connection to the main characters. The pacing was not to my taste. I felt often like a horse with a bit in it's mouth, wanting to gallop through the story, and Liane kept pulling back on the reins. But I WANTED the story, that was the thing, because Liane Moriarty is a genius of a writer. She keeps an astounding razor's edge balance between humour, sadness, beauty and tremors of deeply disturbing dysfunction in her characters. The way she dramatizes her grasp of human psychology is without parallel. Her plotting is superb. She weaves uncountable threads together, the effect like a magic trick. I connected deeply to her voice, a voice admirably without judgement, just facts. Yes, parts of this book left me wanting, but the rest was so masterful, I have to give Apples Never Fall five stars.

I am already a big fan of Liane Moriarty, but I think this is one of her best accomplishments! After listening to me going on about it forever, my husband also read it and loved it. He is a huge tennis fan and was convinced that Liane Moriarty must play a lot of tennis to have the insights about the game that she put in this book. He was very impressed when he researched it afterwards and discovered that she is not in fact a tennis player. I myself am not a tennis fan, but that didn't matter at all. This is a book about a family and the interrelationship of all the complex characters within it. Moriarty stats her writing chops by handling the multiple points of view with clarity and skill. Each character is interesting and compelling, and the way she brings them all together is genius. The red herrings that Moriarty threw into this book created a lot of suspense, which I really enjoyed, and as usual I was impressed by her insights into human psychology and what makes people do the things that they do.