Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty
Liane Moriarty is the kind of author where I save her books for when I need something I know I’m really going to like. She’s so good at characters, creating realistic and believable people and having them interact with each other in plausible ways. This book, unlike her others, is not about rich Australian suburban moms. It’s about a group of people from disparate walks of life, though they’re all Australian and none of them are especially poor.
This was a fun book, and I enjoyed reading it. That said, it is not as strong as some of her other works. Unlike Big Little Lies and The Husband’s Secret, the secrets that these people keep are not the kind of secrets that can destroy lives. Revealing the secrets doesn’t really change how people react to one another so much as deepen the characters. So and so used to be famous. So and so suddenly became rich due to extraordinary luck. I liked all the characters, and I liked learning about them, but they were merely “very well done” instead of “brilliant.”
While this book has satisfactory happy endings for almost all (all?) of the characters, I did cry an awful lot while reading this book because it touches on suicide and the loss of a child. There’s tension in the latter half of the book when shit goes sideways and you wonder if everyone is going to make it out alive, but I would still qualify this book as more of a “heartfelt novel” than “psychological thriller.” I did worry about what would happen to them, and about all the twists and turns, but when I think about the book a week later, it’s the crying and the happy endings I remember more than the “how will they get out of this?” chapter.
This isn’t the most “Liane Moriarty” of her books, and it’s not her best work, but it’s still very good and worth reading.
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