I'm not so sure how to rate this one.

The book deals with some heavy topics, so here are some trigger warnings with as few spoilers as possible:
suicide, death, grief, fire, infertility

For a book with such heavy topics, it felt much lighter than I was expecting. This meant it was easy to read, but I don't think the lightheartedness of so much of this worked well. Due to the nature of the story, we learn most of what we know about the characters from their conversations, so this book is a whole lot of tell and not a lot of show. The parts that show us the characters are the best parts by far.

I found the idea of this story intriguing. Some required a bit of a suspension of belief at first, like the fact that Tallie brings a strange man to her home when she knows nothing about him. As a therapist, she should know much more about getting someone help in this situation while also keeping boundaries to keep herself safe.

Tallie was a bit of a problematic character for me. She's supposed to be 40. Her character's voice and actions make her feel like she's 20. She's very naïve and although she thinks about deeper aspects of what is happening to her, she doesn't seem to actually process them. I think if she were written to be younger, her actions would make more sense to me. I do like some things about her, of course, but she required me to suspend some of my belief about what an actual person would do in her situation.

Emmett works much better as a character on the page. His story is slowly revealed over the course of the book and I felt much more empathy for him than I did for Tallie. It made the story feel unbalanced for me. I wanted to care about these characters equally.

This was a BOTM book for me and I'm still glad I picked it. It's on the edge of what I'd normally pick for myself. I'll read more by this author because she has a strong writing style.