My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

I could weave you a friendship bracelet made of hair. I decided against it. It has a serial-killer quality to it, though it’s useful if you want to go down the voodoo route.

 

‘The playground mafia has been around for years,’ Joyce carries on. ‘In my day it was Jeanie McGovern. I had her son round to play and he came to my house and crapped in a drawer. When I told her, and I was discreet about it, she told me I’d made it up and then spent years spreading rumours around about Tom.’ ‘What sort of rumours?’ I ask, mortified at the thought of someone defecating in a drawer. ‘It was such a bizarre reaction. She made him the centre of every nits outbreak for years. It ended with me slapping her in the playground.’

 

‘You joined the PTA?’ she asks. ‘Emma told me it would be a good way to make friends.’ ‘Never listen to Emma. Her girls are in a private school where everyone wears padded gilets and eats pheasant. Their PTA raffles off cars. Mine raffles off dusty bottles of cherry brandy. I won a bottle once that was half-drunk.’

 

You forget about the cascading effect of social media in these playground battles. One moment you tell a group that your son has a rash and the next he’s a social pariah with possible leprosy.

 

‘Gracie,’ she says, softly. ‘We lost Cam, her dear Olivier and our wonderful Tom. We will never replace them. That light has gone out. We shouldn’t replace them. But never think people can’t come in, that we’ve lost some capacity to love. We’re still alive, it does our loved ones no justice to be sitting here in darkness.’ And there it is. This is why I welcomed Linh into my world. Beautiful turns of phrase like that soothed my tired and confused soul; they still do. And she’s right. We lost three amazing people but, through their loss, our lives all became entwined.

My Review:

 

 I savored every perfectly chosen word of this riotously humorous yet poignant tale. I adore Kristen Bailey and of the handful of books I’ve read, this may be her best yet. The crisp storylines were rife with every type of rib-tickling humor from wry and acerbic wit to ribald comedy. I smirked, chortled, and giggle-snorted my way through although there were also just as many thoughtfully written, insightful, and heart-squeezing scenes of great loss, vulnerability, grief, anger, and betrayal. Ms. Bailey hit all the feels and plundered every emotion with agility and finesse.

As always, her characters were fully inhabited and enticingly intriguing and curiously alluring. I am eagerly anticipating Lucy’s story and cannot wait to see what this clever scribe does with the inner musings of the last remaining Callaghan sister’s tale. I had a feeling she would be saving the best, and most outrageous character of Lucy, for last.

One can only hope she is currently locked in the attic scribbling away. Please write quickly, Ms. Bailey, you won’t even need to leave home for sustenance as your devoted fangirl can have offerings of gin and Marmite winging your way.