The Husband's Secret in What's the Name of That Book???

Jul 13, 2013 Melissa Rochelle rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: arc, ebook, amyeinhorn, marriage, read-2013

While reading this book, I definitely had a few questions for my husband. Including "do you have any life altering secrets you need to tell me?" Talk about a rocked world. Poor Cecilia. Poor Rachel. Poor Tess. I even felt bad for the husbands.

I loved that this book kept me asking questions about myself -- what would I do in that situation? And I kept questioning the characters actions like I knew them. "Stop doing that!" And "How can you forgive them?" Each character was well-developed and Mori ...more

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Feb 01, 2014 Dawn rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: book-club, 2014

A good book club book. (Talk about “damning with faint praise”!) The writing was good (Moriarty has some delightfully wicked insights into human nature) and the story fast-paced. I liked it…finished it in two days…but it was just a little too much. It’s one of those books that is wonderful in the moment, but left me feeling hyperglycemic.

It wasn’t just the constantly high emotional pitch. For one thing, Moriarty is a bit heavy-handed with the Berlin Wall symbolism. It was clever at first, but by ...more

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Aug 17, 2020 Melinda Worfolk rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, women-authors, 2020-2024

3.5 stars. I’ll say this: Liane Moriarty is very good at creating interesting characters and plots. What a great hook: a wife finds a sealed envelope with her husband’s handwriting on the front, saying it’s only to be opened in the event of his death. He is very much alive. Should she open it? Would you open it? What on earth can be inside?

I also like Moriarty’s writing style. She has a knack for writing in the third person while making you feel as though she’s writing in first person. She’s goo 3.5 stars. I’ll say this: Liane Moriarty is very good at creating interesting characters and plots. What a great hook: a wife finds a sealed envelope with her husband’s handwriting on the front, saying it’s only to be opened in the event of his death. He is very much alive. Should she open it? Would you open it? What on earth can be inside?

I also like Moriarty’s writing style. She has a knack for writing in the third person while making you feel as though she’s writing in first person. She’s good at quick, witty dialogue and description, especially describing characters’ inner monologue. Also, and this is hard to do well, she balances dramatic and often quite sad situations with humour. I don’t know how she does it without being jarring, but she does. Finally, her characters are very real—they are well rounded, flawed but still likeable. Even the prickly ones, like Rachel in this book, are understandable. That’s not to say she lets them off the hook; they admit to themselves that they’re being unreasonable sometimes even when they have excellent reasons for being bitter or angry. They’re not always nice. They don’t always do the right thing. But they are self reflective and usually well aware of their own flaws.

So why the 3.5 stars? Well, primarily I felt like the Tess storyline was a bit extraneous. I got impatient with it about halfway through. Perhaps I was just too invested in the Rachel and Cecelia storylines, but I found myself impatient when reading about Tess, when I actually just wanted to get back to Rachel and Cecelia. Her story’s resolution was also the most predictable and least satisfying to me.

That said, the ending was good, and I also liked the epilogue. I do find Liane Moriarty a bit uneven, but she’s so entertaining I am never sorry to have given her a try. I still think Big Little Lies is her best that I’ve read so far, and it’s the one I’d most recommend. Also, Caroline Lee does an excellent job of reading both BLL and this book. Highly recommend the audiobook of both! ...more

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Apr 16, 2014 Cindy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Life is about choices. There are a myriad of lives we could be leading but we have the ones we created by making certain decisions. In this novel, three tangentially related family are tied together by secrets, secrets thought to be long gone but instead are still very much alive. These secrets set all three families on a trajectory. Mingled in with their tales are inserts about the Berlin Wall and it's oppressive symbolism as well as its momentous destruction. Enjoy! ...more

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Jul 04, 2014 Nora rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Great, great, great audio book reading of a pretty good book.

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Sep 08, 2015 Kathleen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I thought this would be just a quick summer read and was surprised to find it very thought provoking.Interesting well-drawn characters and a plot which keeps surprising.

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Dec 05, 2016 Tiffany rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Another compelling book club read from Liane Moriarty (we read Big Little Lies last year). I will warn you that it's pretty depressing, although I liked the "what if"s in the epilogue. ...more

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