hot take what it is with books featuring sociopaths that we’re meant to empathize with these days? this would have been a four star thriller if Rothschild had stuck to keeping Tom unlikeable and stuck with the consequences of his actions.
Unfortunately, this is a review that really does need the spoiler/plot point at around 15% to be revealed in order to say anything of interest. And in order to get there, you also have to get the very first spoiler, the aforementioned “shocking event that changes their lives forever.”
Will first try to say some stuff without it–I appreciate that this book takes a swing (and, I would argue, not a miss) with the narrative POV. It’s sort of an omniscient third person via a non-present first person, which some reviewers found annoying but which I found sort of interesting. It’s also a happily unlikeable character as the main, but unlikeable in ways that are reasonable–they make a decision (a real choice) and then just spiral out from there. I worry sometimes that I actually don’t have patience for unlikeable characters, and as a result am cutting out a lot of interesting books, but it’s good to know that I can deal (even if they are my favorite genre, the emotionally stunted manchild–yes, he makes a reappearance!).
There’s also a huge undercurrent of, this book is only possible because our main character is conveniently wealthy. I don’t know that I dislike on principle, more that it’s a convenient way to sweep under the table some otherwise thorny logistics that would make the whole thing a bit more of a slog. Lastly, there are a lot of twists in this book, but the last one could have been so good in a twisted, omg it’s coming from inside the house way–except that it was choreographed a mile away, even to me.
So, now, to the spoilers:
[First off, the first twist–that Honor and Chloe are killed by a suicide bomber masquerading as a pregnant in the lobby of the Ritz in Paris at the end of the first chapter–was incredibly jarring but honestly a good shout. Hard to remember the last time I’ve been so genuinely shocked. The second twist, that Tom finds the name of the anonymous egg donor they’d used to have a second child via surrogacy and proceeds to like, incept his way into her life without telling her, was also great while being utterly infuriating. Like, you loathe him for being duplicitous and making such a hash of his life, but at the same time you cannot stop reading to figure out how this entire house of cards is going to fall on top of him.
The issue is that the third twist, that Lisa (Leslie?) has always been in love with Tom and is surreptitiously sabotaging his relationship with egg donor Grace, is SO choreographed as to be ridiculous. If you’ve got an omniscient narrator (literally, dead Honor continues to narrate in the first person) who is picking up on LisaLeslie’s overly possessive comments and ‘odd’ mentions of having been set up with Tom eons ago, then the shoe should drop waaaaaaaay before.
But even that aside, the BIGGEST issue is that Rothschild isn’t willing to have Tom live with the consequences of his actions. In this aspect, the book falls into the trap frequently meandered into by books that do the whole “they fell in love by writing anonymous letters/article to one another, then met in real life, and one of them knows that they’re penpals and one doesn’t” (e.g., The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy) which seems romantic but is really just deception writ (ha) large. In this case, of course, it’s deception of the highest magnitude and there should be NO REASON why Grace takes him back other than to give him a happy ending. And because she’s pregnant which, UGH, accidental pregnancy adjusting the life decisions of characters, my least fave trope.]
So end of day, I give this 3* instead of 2* because I was quite enthralled and felt great thriller vibes for most of this book. But from a plot perspective, no.