Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I’ll get right to the flaws of this novel. It’s dry and self-centered. The setup is intriguing. A relatively newly married couple, with two kids each from previous relationships, is trying to make a life together. The couple met and connected while working on a research project together. But that project is completed and now they are working on separate, individual projects, and that is bringing challenges to their relationship. And then they’re going through all the usual ups and downs of parenting, with the added factor of each of the kids now being raised by a parent who is not their biological mom/dad. The big problem is the author’s first person narrator tells of their lives in a dry way, mostly via her own thoughts and perceptions. I get that this is not an action-based novel, but rather a contemplative one. But it winds up feeling more like a series of journal entries than a story. And the narrator is so self-centered as to be annoying, plus her self absorption makes it so that she never really draws out the other characters enough to make them come to life and seem interesting. Instead of a 400-page novel with so much dry narrative, this should have been a 250-page one where the narrator showed us all that happened among the characters and allowed us room to have our own perceptions about them and their experiences.