Date Started: 11/11/11
Date Finished: 11/12/11
One-Word Summary: Meh
I wandered into a Barnes & Noble with my husband and, after not being in a book store in ages, was overcome with the desire to buy a book. This was the one I chose, based on the intriguing inside flap:
Allison Glenn tried to hide what happened that night...and failed. The consequence? A prison sentence. Now she's free. But secrets have a way of keeping you locked up.
Grabs your interest, right? Well...
Here is the TOTAL spoiler of the entire book.
Allison got pregnant and covered it up. Her sister, Brynn, was there and helped her through it. When the baby (a girl) was born, she wasn't breathing and Brynn thought she was dead. She takes the baby to the river and drops it in...only to hear it cry. Despite her desperate attempts to get the baby back, she fails, and the body is found the next day. However, at the same time, Allison has given birth to a boy, who they bundle up and take to the father's house and leave him there. He leaves so his sister, Charm, and former step-father try to raise the baby but can't make it and ultimately the baby is left at a fire station under the new safe haven laws. He gets adopted into a great family where all is fine until 5 years later when Allison is released from prison, having served the sentence for killing the baby girl when really it was her sister who did it. All of these people end up in the same place with almost-tragic consequences.
Brynn, as it turns out, is a total head case. In the climactic scene of the book, Brynn is left alone with Allison's son and tries to drown him so that he can be with his sister. He is ultimately saved by his aunt, Charm, who administers CPR but the end result is that the adoptive family takes him and moves away so as to not have contact with Allison or Charm ever again. So the two people who tried to do the right thing are ultimately punished. Brynn, by the way, dies in the same river she dumped the baby in.
The chapters are broken out into different narrators: Allison, Brynn, Claire (the adoptive mother) and Charm. It was a useful tool in telling the story but did make it a bit disjointed. I was also frustrated by the fact that Allison's family life is never explained. Ok, so she was the perfectionist of the family and Brynn never measured up, but was she really as much of a bitch as Brynn made her out to be? The flashbacks don't seem to back that up. And what's the deal with the parents? They just drop her as soon as she doesn't meet their expectations (which seem to have been put on Allison BY Allison, not her parents)? At the very end they ask why Allison gave everything up to cover up Brynn and Allison's answer is simple - she loved her sister. Yet we're supposed to believe that her parents can't grasp this and can't move on with a relationship with their daughter, beyond offering to give her money anyway. I suppose some parents would be like that but it seems harsh given that they've just found out that Allison was innocent all along.
This was an ok book and one that, since I have it in paperback, I'll easily be able to pass along to my mom!
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