Who are you?
Emma loves her husband Leo and their young daughter Ruby: she’d do anything for them. But almost everything she's told them about herself is a lie.
And she might just have got away with it, if it weren’t for her husband’s job. Leo is an obituary writer; Emma a well-known marine biologist. When she suffers a serious illness, Leo copes by doing what he knows best – researching and writing about his wife’s life. But as he starts to unravel the truth, he discovers the woman he loves doesn’t really exist. Even her name isn’t real.
When the very darkest moments of Emma’s past finally emerge, she must somehow prove to Leo that she really is the woman he always thought she was . . .But first, she must tell him about the other love of her life.
Comment: Some years ago I've given a book by this author as a gift to a friend. While in the process of choosing, the author's other title, meaning this one, somehow caught my eye, and I've decided to get it for myself.
Emma and Leo have a great marriage, and their lives have become richer since the birth of their daughter Ruby. Their professional lives are stable as well, and it all seems to be perfect until the day Leo notices something strange and decides to investigate. At the same time, while doing his everyday work of writing obituaries, he is reprehended over a piece he pre-wrote for the wife of a BBC presenter, who has been missing, in case she is found dead. All this things put him in a position of suspicion and Leo decides to look at some details his wife told him, and that he found to be lies. What exactly is she hiding and why? Is there any connection with the BBC presenter and if so, what happened?
The blurb of this book seemed to hint at a mystery/light thriller and that was the main reason why I was interested in reading it. Although this isn't my most consumed genre, I like to try things that might catch my eye and while the plot of this one didn't seem to indicate anything original, I was still curious enough to try.
From the start, this was precisely the idea I had, that while Leo and Emma had a good relationship, she was hiding something and it really seems that her secret is an affair. Things were going well enough, if not spectacular, but I will say I wasn't totally convinced by the first person narrator, alternated between Leo and Emma's POVs. I suppose the tactic is obvious, this way we only get their perspective and everyone knows sometimes narrators aren't reliable. However, this forced way to keep up the mystery elements also made the writing jarring, and I don't think the author pulled it off.
As things move along, I've started to notice that the thriller vibe was becoming less and less intense, so much that around the middle of the book this story looked more like any other woman's fiction novel and not a mystery anymore, even though certain things had not yet been shared. The secrets became obvious, though, and having the book divided into three parts, in which the second (slightly after half way) with Emma's POV twenty years before "explaining everything" was a little disappointing. The third part is actually about how the characters process things, without any real mystery yet to uncover.
As I often do after finishing a book, I've glanced at some other readers' reviews and saw that several believe the issue to have been the mix of genres. it doesn't seem clear what the author intended with this novel, and I agree in part. If it was meant to be a mystery, I feel it wasn't thrilling, if it was more about the characters' development, then the execution failed to keep up the motivation. I've finished only to see if Leo and Emma would still be married at the end, but the story did lack some excitement after a while.
Leo and Emma seem to be a good couple and having access to their thoughts makes me like them, they do seem good people, even though Emma is hiding something. When we find out what, it's really not that bad, well, from a moral POV I mean, it certainly would have been stressful, traumatic and chaotic if to happen to real people. Still, while they are good people, while I understand them, the writing style never brought them to any sphere of uniqueness and they could have been any other characters.
Some of Emma's choices in the present seem to be exaggerated and it does seem that she went too far by keeping such a secret from Leo. I suppose I can understand but at the same time it does feel that her reactions and options weren't really justified.
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