Brilliant, as usual, is the perfect word to sum up Monica McInerney's work! ( )

Overall I enjoyed this - it was sweet and touching, and had some grittiness to it. I do think it could have been dramatically shorter, but it was still good. Thanks to @bookishfirst and @welbeckpublish for the early copy!
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Synopsis: Eliza is about 30 when she loses her job and apartment in one fell swoop. She decides to travel to Scotland to visit her two godmothers--the best friends of her mother who passed away when Eliza was 17--and finally learn about her family.
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A lot of this was really raw. The issues that Eliza's mom dealt with, her addictions and mental health. And what Eliza ended up struggling with as a result of losing her mom at such a young age, and not knowing what of her past was real or fake. The ending in particular was really powerful and almost hard to read. They hint at a secret throughout the book, but I didn't see that coming.
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I also really liked Eliza as a character, and her relationship with her two godmothers Olivia and Maxie. I liked seeing them grow in that friendship, especially thinking about how they were finally getting to know each other as adults, as opposed to two adults and a child.
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The other side characters were cute, but some were kind of like caricatures--the precocious 11-year-old, the cranky old woman who's just lonely. I also felt like Lawrence was just kind of *there* until all of a sudden he became super important, it came out of nowhere.
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There also ended up being a lot of plot points that seemed unnecessary. LIke why did Olivia want to pretend that Eliza's trip to Scotland was a secret when it wasn't? And a lot of extra story was contrived to send Eliza to London, where she finds her mother's postcards, but Maxie was supposed to bring them to Scotland anyway. It just felt like a lot could have been edited out or shortened.
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Still, an enjoyable story, and the next-to-last chapter totally made it for me! ( )

“‘I don’t want two wishy-washy godmothers,’ she had said that afternoon in the country hospital when Eliza was only a day old. ‘No dolls. No pink dresses. Just lots of adventures. Lots of spoiling. The pair of you like two mighty warriors protecting her at every step.’”

Given the title, it’s not too hard to deduce what happens to Eliza’s mother in this story, but with the way the two are written interacting, the enormous love that exists between them, the end of the first chapter is still a gut punch.

Story-wise, this is my favorite kind of contemporary read. It’s a heartfelt story about grief, even years after the fact, but more than that it’s about a young woman learning about her mother’s past, about strengthening the bonds between her and who she has left, and about creating new bonds along the way. I don’t think it’s the perfect book, as I found it a little too long with some plotty details I didn’t really care about much, but it was overall a pleasure to read.

Every character just a caricature. Not only were the characters shallowly drawn, but I couldn't relate to any of them. My first McInerney book and will definitely be my last. If reading hadn't been so easy (audiobook, quite well narrated considering the lousy material they had to work with) I would have abandoned it before the end. Predictable, in a general, romantic sense, even if the foreshadowed 'secret' wasn't obvious. ( )

Lovely story with lovable characters. This is an easy read and I found myself wanting the characters solve all their problems. I recommend this book, this author knows how to write a page turner. ( )