Amy 
women's fiction
Sophie amazingly inherits a house belonging to the great
aunt of her ex-boyfriend. This house is
on a private island which was the site of a decades-old disappearance
mystery. However, the quirky generations
of family members who grew up and still live on the island aren’t all happy
about Sophie’s inheritance and, with the matriarch gone, cracks in the façade
of a happy family begin to widen.
I’ve enjoyed several of Liane Moriarty’s books. The Last Anniversary was the earliest published novel of hers that I’ve read. I could definitely tell that her story
crafting wasn’t quite as strong in this early work but her characters were very
entertaining as usual. Mainly, the
beginning suffered in structure. It jumped around and wasn’t easy to settle in
to, especially since I was listening to the audiobook and had trouble
remembering character specifics. So many of them were introduced early without sufficient time to get to know them. But, once I felt that I had gotten a good
grip on the situations, I went back and listened to the beginning again and was
so glad I did. I had completely missed a
lot of the nuance and foundation.
The story was engaging. I was very happy to spend time with
the characters, learn about their lives, and couldn’t wait to find out how
things would turn out. Moriarty has a
way of creating characters so that you feel like you know them. They have their eccentricities but they
aren’t unbelievably wacky. They allow us to laugh at ourselves. And her
stories are always fun.
The audiobook is read by Heather Wilds. She is good when
she’s acting the characters and even has several different voices. However,
when she’s the narrator, she adopts an aggressive monotone, almost of news
anchor formality, which does not fit the story and is very offputting. I believe she is a large cause of my initial
confusion with the story. Her voice kept distracting me because it was out of
place. I’ll give her a B.
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