Truly Madly Guilty - Liane Moriarty

A colleague was listening to this via audiobook and mentioned it was intriguing--she was about halfway through when this came up--albeit a bit slow.  I already had a copy on my shelf, and I like being able to discuss books with people rather than just shouting into the void of the internet (hello out there!) so I picked it up.  When I was about halfway through with the book, she was done...and when I mentioned it was super slow and probably not going to be as dramatic as it was making itself out to be, she confirmed.  I finished it anyway.  What a mistake.

I am fairly certain this was supposed to be a book of domestic suspense.  The book is divided into two parts that pretty much alternate chapters: the day of the barbecue, and a few months after.  The first half of the book is spent either building up to this barbecue, or characters talking vaguely about how it changed everything, in what was clearly a very negative way.  And there's something about sex!  So here I am going, "Orgy?  Someone gets killed at an orgy?  What is it?"

What it is, is disappointing.  All of the build up for that?  The characters' lives are so mundane.  They all spend all of their time sniping at each other, and even discovering a dead body can't liven things up in this story.  They're all so boring, so blah.  I did not care about any of them, not at all.  And when the big "reveal" happened, I cared even less, because there's no suspense!  You know everything is going to be fine!  There's no real concern about that, because Moriarty has as good as told us that before the reveal happened.  So really, this is just a bunch of adults being melodramatic and having spats and avoiding each other like they are children, instead of talking to each other like functional human beings.

But what is really wrong with this book is the pacing.  It is slower than the slowest of snails.  And this slow pace isn't filled in by character development or self-discovery or anything like that, but rather instead relating every aspect of the characters' lives.  While some of these held promise--such as Erika's mother and Erika's upbringing--most of it was children screaming, adults moaning about their sex lives or lack thereof, and other things that just weren't compelling reading.  For what started out feeling like it was going to be a page-turner, it took me weeks to finish this book.

Also, no one is guilty in this book.  Blah.

Teach your kids to swim, folks.

1.5 stars out of 5.