Determined to get to the second book in the series that everyone I knew had assured me was "the best," over the years, I must've picked up and earnestly started my paperback copy of Emily Giffin's Something Borrowed dozens of times but just couldn't relate to the characters.
And while I feared the same would be true for Giffin's latest novel All We Ever Wanted, especially considering that the first chapter of the book – which divides the storyline into three alternating first person points-of-view – began from the perspective of the wealthy one percenter wife from Nashville's elite, Giffin quickly replaces first world problems with real world problems.
Shocked to her core upon discovering appalling decision made by her Princeton bound son, in trying to get to the bottom of what exactly happened and what on Earth he was thinking, Nina Browning is forced to take a good hard look at her life and marriage as well as her past when she found herself at the other end of a similar horrific situation.
Continuing the action from the perspective of the two main other parties involved including her son's younger classmate, Lyla and Lyla's protective single father Tom, Giffin deftly balances her richly compelling drama with timely issues of economic inequality, racism, and sexual harassment in the digital age.
Surprising her readers with a few well-earned twists, while despite the narrative roller-coaster, we're pretty sure we know precisely who's to blame, ultimately it's in Lyla and Nina's journey toward accepting and understanding the truth that made the book increasingly hard to stop reading, particularly in its second half.
An ideal property for HBO to look into adapting as part of its annual miniseries exploration of twenty-first century women in literature, All We Ever Wanted might have been my first Emily Giffin work but it's just the right one to make me want to pick up Something Borrowed again for good.
And while I feared the same would be true for Giffin's latest novel All We Ever Wanted, especially considering that the first chapter of the book – which divides the storyline into three alternating first person points-of-view – began from the perspective of the wealthy one percenter wife from Nashville's elite, Giffin quickly replaces first world problems with real world problems.
Shocked to her core upon discovering appalling decision made by her Princeton bound son, in trying to get to the bottom of what exactly happened and what on Earth he was thinking, Nina Browning is forced to take a good hard look at her life and marriage as well as her past when she found herself at the other end of a similar horrific situation.
Continuing the action from the perspective of the two main other parties involved including her son's younger classmate, Lyla and Lyla's protective single father Tom, Giffin deftly balances her richly compelling drama with timely issues of economic inequality, racism, and sexual harassment in the digital age.
Surprising her readers with a few well-earned twists, while despite the narrative roller-coaster, we're pretty sure we know precisely who's to blame, ultimately it's in Lyla and Nina's journey toward accepting and understanding the truth that made the book increasingly hard to stop reading, particularly in its second half.
An ideal property for HBO to look into adapting as part of its annual miniseries exploration of twenty-first century women in literature, All We Ever Wanted might have been my first Emily Giffin work but it's just the right one to make me want to pick up Something Borrowed again for good.