The Ever After by Sarah Pekkanen

Josie and Frank Moore are happy… at least Josie thinks they are. As parents of two young girls in the Chicago suburbs, their days can be both busy and monotonous, and sometimes Josie wonders how she became a harried fortysomething mother rather than the driven career woman she once was. But Frank is a phenomenal father, he’s handsome and charismatic, and he still looks at his wife like she’s the beautiful woman he married more than a decade ago. Josie isn’t just happy—she’s lucky.

Until one Saturday morning when Josie borrows her husband’s phone to make a quick call—and sees nine words that shatter her world.

Now Josie feels as if she is standing at the edge of a sharp precipice. As she looks back at pivotal moments in the relationship she believed would last forever, she is also plunging ahead, surprising everyone (especially herself) with how far she will go to uncover the extent of her husband’s devastating secret.

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I’m super torn on my rating for this novel. I flew through The Ever After, reading it over 2 sittings, but I didn’t like the novel and was overall disappointed.

I really enjoyed Sarah Pekkanen’s other novels – The Wife Between Us & The Perfect Neighbors. I was hoping for a mystery thriller and I got a predictable drama about a wife finding out a secret about her husband that causes her to question her life.

I wish there was more action in the novel. You learn of the “secret” early on and then nothing really happened. The reader is dragged through Josie’s thoughts on what she is going to do next.

The positives are that the book is really hard to put down and it only 250 pages! I’m really surprised how quickly I read the novel, especially when I wasn’t loving it. Pekkanen really knows how to write and makes you keep flipping pages.

2 calculators out of a potential 5. I wouldn’t recommend, especially to those that enjoyed Pekkanen’s previous novels.

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