Cannonball Read Bingo: Snake
I was in the middle of dragging my way through “The Three Body Problem” (good book, but woof, is it dense) and saw this one on a perusal of my library’s “Hot Reads” shelf, the newest from Liane Moriarty. I greatly enjoyed the audio version of “Big Little Lies” and wanted to give her another go, this time reading it the old-fashioned way. I figured it would be a bit of summer fun reading, and I was right.
This book is like warm apple pie topped with whipped cream and served alongside a generous scoop of ice cream on a summer afternoon: sinfully delicious. I read this book in two days over the course of one weekend. It was riveting time in my hammock following the twists and turns of the Delaney family. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of it because this is definitely a book where much of the fun is in being bamboozled by the plot points, but suffice it to say there is a snake in the henhouse of this family of chickens.
The Delaney’s have just retired from a lifetime of running their own successful tennis school and are looking with joy and a bit of resolution toward their retirement. They coached countless children to tennis success, including one notable Australian prodigy, and have raised four children. Their children, now adults, though no tennis pro among them, have managed to make it to adulthood with only a moderate amount of emotional baggage. When the family matriarch Joy goes missing, they and we don’t know who to suspect. Does one of the children know more than they are letting on? Is their father, Stan to blame? Or does this have something to do with a mystery houseguest they were harboring?
Obviously, I couldn’t put this book down, and it’s been quite a while since a novel had me so gripped and so fooled. Just when I thought I had made sense of it, Moriarty pulled the rug out from under me. Some of her story choices took me right up to the limits of the edge of believability, but I was here for it. I’m super excited to pick up more of her books and am waiting for the right moment when I need a jolt of literary fun.