It All Comes Down to This

Well-written book with a pat ending that was lovely but (in my opinion) far-fetched to the point of absurdity.

Overall, I found the characters compelling and I was intrigued by their stories, but I felt this book - in large part because of how it ended - to be a little too “shiny”. I preferred ‘A Good Neighborhood' - but I would recommend this for anyone looking for a chicken-soup-for-the-soul-esque novel.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the ARC.

This book about family secrets, sisterhood, and missed chances really struck a chord with me. While I most identified with Beck, I did find the other two sisters (Claire and Sophie) interesting in their own ways as well. In particular, I hadn't ever seen an examination of what it's like to be a “influencer-adjacent” like Sophie, who survives through her friendships and connections with famous friends, but has accomplished little on her own and wound up seriously in debt. When their mother dies and leaves the old famous home in Maine to the girls to sell off, it causes ripples throughout all three lives they didn't see coming. If you're a fan of intricately-woven family dynamics, you should enjoy this one. The writing is well-done, as we've come to expect from Fowler who has established her bonafides with best sellers in the past. While the plot did get lost a bit in the middle and began to meander, it ultimately came together in the end in a satisfying way.

Nothing Technically Wrong, Yet SLOW. This is one of those books where there is nothing technically blatantly wrong about the storytelling... and yet the reader is left with the sense that this story could have been so much more engaging had it been told differently. To the level that while this book is around the 350 page mark, it almost reads as though it is a dense academic tome of twice its length - even though it very clearly is not. As other reviewers have noted, there are a LOT of characters to keep up with early, but that does in fact get easier probably by even the 25 - 33% mark, once we've visited each a couple of times and get a sense of where their individual arcs are. In the end, this is a solid slice of life family drama that touches on very real and very messy issues, but could have been better told in this format with several dozen fewer pages (to speed the pacing) or with this number of pages in a different format. Still, as noted, there is nothing technically wrong here and other readers may have a better time with this book. Recommended.