Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo

Amy 

women’s fiction

Julia, a stay-at-home mom to two young adults, is not comfortable within her own skin and always feels like she’s playing a part.

Same As It Ever Was begins with Julia running into someone who obviously held some place of infamy in her earlier life. This is the seed planted by Claire Lombardo to keep the reader invested in this long, slow-paced, look into Julia’s depressed mental state. But then, once we get the answer to that question and the big climax happens before the mid-way point of the novel, the story just continues as mundanely as ever. Lombardo does throw us another bone to keep us reading, which is the suggestion that something awful and secret happened to her when she was 17 years old. But even though this mystery carries us through the rest of the novel, its explanation is not Earth-shattering. Rather, it’s a bittersweet, soft ending.

The audiobook was over 18 hours long and it’s literally just about one woman’s unremarkable life. Yes, she had a rotten childhood. But she, like many people with imperfect parents, made it out and grew up to consciously not be like her mother. Then she found a wonderful, patient, attractive, wealthy man with whom to spend the rest of her life. And yet, she’s never happy. And I mean, never—except when she’s hormonal during pregnancy. She makes the motions every day, doing what she feels she has to do. But she is, obviously, depressed. Her family sees it but doesn’t know how to help her and, since she does show that she loves them, they just all go through life. Ho hum.

That’s all there is to it. It felt very, very long. The only reason I kept listening was because this was for Book Club and I had no other audiobooks at the time. I imagine the Book Club discussion will be about expectations for women in society, motherhood, marriage, dealing with things like your children growing up and going to college, blah, blah, blah. Life! Nothing extremely unique or unusual to see here.

The audiobook narrator, Emily Rankin, did a great job with her voice acting. She displayed a more limited vocal repertoire than I remember hearing from her in other books. I’ll give her an A-.