Jaclyn’s Review: If You Left by Ashley Prentice Norton

If You Left
written by Ashley Prentice Norton
published by Mariner Books, 2016

find it here: (affiliate links) Barnes & Noble, Amazon, iBooks, Book Depository, Walmart, Goodreads

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Did I enjoy this book: This was a pretty standard work of fiction. It held my interest, but I didn’t really feel a compelling urge to finish reading it. It wasn’t a bad read, but it wasn’t great either. I liked that it didn’t have a “neat” ending.

Would I recommend it: I wouldn’t search out and buy this book. If you found it in a beach rental next summer–or if you find it on a friend’s bookshelf, I’d read it.

 

 

About the book – from Goodreads:

A seductive novel about a privileged but damaged Manhattan wife whose main source of stability — her marriage — comes under threat, from forces both without and within.

For most of their marriage, Althea has fluctuated between extreme depressive and manic states — what she calls “the Tombs” and “the Visions” — and Oliver has been the steady hand that guided her to safety. This summer, Althea decides that she will be different from here on. She will be the loving, sexy wife Oliver wants, and the reliable, affectionate mother their nine year-old daughter Clem deserves. Her plan: to bring Clem to their Easthampton home once school is out — with no “summer girl” to care for her this time — and become “normal.”

But Oliver is distant and controlling, and his relationship with their interior decorator seems a bit too close; Clem has learned to be self-sufficient, and getting to know her now feels like very hard work for Althea. Into this scene enters the much younger, David Foster Wallace–reading house painter, who reaches something in Althea that has been long buried.

Fearless, darkly funny, and compulsively readable, If You Left explores the complex dance that is the bipolar marriage, and the possibility that to move forward, we might have to destroy the very things we’ve worked hardest to build.