Stephanie Eding’s Said No One Ever didn’t quite work for me. There were parts of it that were charming and fun but as a whole it didn’t come together.
Ellie arrives at her airbnb in the middle of nowhere Montana as her hostess, Marilyn, is being carted off in an ambulance. Ellie doesn’t know what happened or how she’s supposed to take care of these farm animals. She’s not supposed to be figuring out how to take care of sheep, donkeys and chickens, she is supposed to be figuring out her life. She has just broken up with her longtime boyfriend, she knows she’s about to be unemployed, and she won’t be able to afford her apartment without a job. She’s got a lot going on and three weeks to figure it out. Her family knows exactly what she should do – get back together with her ex and become the nanny for her sister’s children. With a little help from the charming neighbor and a visit with Marilyn in the nursing home where she is to recover from a broken leg, Ellie figures it out. When Marilyn’s grumpy grandson shows up he assumes Ellie is up to no good.
The parts of this that really work are Ellie’s relationship with the animals and with Marilyn. As Ellie gets drawn into Marilyn’s shenanigans and caring for the farm animals, she regains some self-confidence. Edings has a way with dialogue and creating animal characters that I enjoyed a lot.
I think this would have worked better for me if this had stayed focused on Ellie and Marilyn and their lovely intergenerational friendship. While there was some very nice banter with the grandson, I really didn’t love the “love triangle.” It felt forced and it was very clear that the charming one would be a snake and the grumpy one would be the good guy. Even with the shoehorned in love triangle, this really isn’t a romance.
I felt like too many things were handled cartoonishly. Lip service was given to how hard it is to make decisions about caring for the elderly, but the characters who were in a position to make those decisions were two-dimensional bad people. Their choices seemed simple and self serving, which made the choices Ellie advocates for simple and good. It felt like there were two different books in here and they didn’t mesh.
CW: families with no boundaries, injuries to the elderly (treated), injury to animals (treated)
I received this as an advance reader copy from Sourcebooks Casablanca and NetGalley. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.