A mothers happiness and identity are shattered when her youngest is killed in an accident that may or may not have involved her daughter. As the mother tells us her story, as if trying to make sense of it all after-the-fact, years later, we see the daughter painted in a fairly cruel light. The psychological component shifts back and forth between the mother having misremembered the fateful moment, and by proxy, who her daughter is and has been her whole life—or is she right.

For me, this felt very predictable but the well-crafted voice and the pacing, chapters being only 3-4 minutes long in the audiobook, made it a quick read. What was truly stand out to me was the way the death changed the mother and her relationship to her husband. That felt really well realized and believable. I also like that his short comings feel organic and less trite; he’s not a gaslighting villain, for instance, the psychological component is all in our narrators mind. The husband is culpable in sadly mundane ways that are only exacerbated with the death of their child.

Because it’s first person there is some latitude here but it annoyed me a lot that the conversations you’d expect them to have never occurred. Even before the death of the child. This is a novel of almost limitless interiority and very little dialogue. It feels very solipsistic in the end. No character has a character arc or is seen clearly, save for the narrator. And that makes a lot of the components of this more uninteresting to me. Especially in the case of the daughter, who may or may not have done this thing, yet we can’t really gauge for ourselves based on recounting of things that would make the mother think this, it’s just a gut feeling she has about her.

The past is interesting in developing the psychological of the narrator, as it cuts in and out of her past to the present day—breaking the assumed semi epistolary narrative perspective—but ultimately doesn’t feel like it comes together to play a part in the plot.

It’s at its best in the first half of the book and when eloquently showing the kind of lasting devastation the loss of a child has on a person. Those moments when she’s alone make the structure feel more vindicated and well chosen. And that’s why I ultimately ended up liking it, in the end. It does have something to say beyond the did-the-daughter-or-didn’t-she, which is more than you get with most commercial fiction.