Me and my spouse have a Christmas tradition of buying each other a book. We generally try to find something that we think the other would like but might not be something they would usually pick out themselves. The Unmaking of June Farrow was my pick for her this year. Not to pat my own back, but I nailed it. She gave it five stars on Goodreads after finishing the whole book in two days. While we are both consistent readers, it is unusual for either of us to get through any book that quickly. I figured I had to read it for myself.
When I finished it, she asked me what I thought. “It was good,” I said, with the notable rise of my voice at the end. “What didn’t you like about it?” she asked. And the answer is not much. The story begins, not surprisingly, with June Farrow. June is not in a great place, having just buried her beloved grandmother after years of her struggling with dementia-like symptoms. But the Farrows have a family history that is causing June to worry. All of the women in the Farrow clan either seem to lose their minds or disappear under mysterious circumstances. They all begin the same way, with hallucinations or hearing people that aren’t really there. And now these mysterious visions are beginning to haunt June, and it is up to her to uncover the truth about what happened to her mother so she can maybe save herself from the same fate.
Okay, now I am going to spoil it.
It’s time travel. The women of the Farrow clan are cursed with the opportunity to travel back in time. This separation of living in two different times eventually starts to affect their mind, and the visions they see are from their own lives, but of what they experienced in the past. The book begins with June in 2022. The Farrows have run a family flower farm in North Carolina for generations, and over the past year June has started having the visions that her grandmother spoke of in the last couple years of her life. June is understandably worried, and she begins delving into the mystery of her mother’s disappearance after discovering a photo of her that was from decades before her mother would have been born.
The book begins as a somewhat creepy mystery as June attempts to unravel the mystery of her family, and a seemingly unrelated murder that occurred back in the 50’s in their small town. However, when it is revealed that the women of the Farrow family are given a few chances to travel back in time, June becomes a much more passive character. Things are explained to her for much of the rest of the book, especially when she goes back into the past, specifically to 1951. The twist is that in 2023, June had gone back in time to 1945. So, she goes back in time to discover a town that already knows her, although she remembers nothing of them. It is an interesting idea, and the time travel is more magic than it is science, so the book does not get too bogged down in trying to explain it.
June’s trip back to 1951 happens about a third of the way in the book, and that is the setting for the rest of the story. She discovers that in her original timeline, she did not go back in time until the following year and when she did, she went back to 1945 and stayed for about five years. The people she meets recognize her and clearly have a history with her, though they are hesitant to reveal any of that to her. And this is where I started to have issues with the progression of the story. June goes from a detective to more of a passive observer. Other characters eventually reveal things to her, and she begins to recover the memories of her previous self. She doesn’t exactly do anything to reclaim these memories, they just come back to her. I was interested in what I was being told, I just wish they had felt more like earned discoveries rather than exposition dumps.
I also can’t help but wonder, would a woman really want to go back and live in the 40’s and 50’s? As a cis white male, I would have an easier time, and I still wouldn’t want to do that. It doesn’t help that the book is set in the south, either. There is even a moment during a town fair where June notices three black women sitting by themselves, taking a smoke break. They don’t get any lines, or even really a moment of reflection from June of like “Oh, right. This is like over a decade before the Civil Rights movement in rural North Carolina… yikes.” I get things are not great now, but there are a lot of issues kind of glossed over in this story in favor of the romance element. If you can look past those, the middle third of this book will probably work better for you than it did for me. Overall, I think it was an entertaining and at times engrossing read. It is kind of a perfect summer day on a beach book. 3.5 stars out of 5.