Synopsis:
Josie and Frank Moore are happy. Well, Josie, at least, thinks they are. As parents of two young girls living in a Chicago suburb, their days can be both busy and monotonous. Sometimes Josie wonders how she became a harried fortysomething mother, rather than the driven career woman she once was. Frank is a phenomenal father, handsom, and charismatic. Because he still looks at his wife like she’s the beautiful woman he married more than a decade ago, Josie isn’t just happy — she’s lucky.
Until one Saturday morning when Josie borrows her husband’s phone to make a quick call and sees nine words that shatter her world.
Now Josie feels as if she is standing at the edge of a sharp precipice. As she looks back at pivotal moments in the relationship she has always believed would last forever, she is also plunging ahead, surprising everyone — especially herself — with how far she will go to uncover the extent of her husband’s devastating secret.
Bestselling author Sarah Pekkanen paints a vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of a marriage before and during a crisis, and of a woman who fears that the biggest secret of all may be the one she’s hiding from herself. The Ever After is a deep exploration of a marriage in crisis in which Pekannen peels back layers of secrets to discover where the relationship veered off course . . . and whether it is worth saving.
Review:
Sarah Pekkanen is the bestselling author of The Opposite of Me, Skipping a Beat, and several other novels. She has also collaborated successfully with former Simon & Schuster editor Greer Hendricks to pen several highly successful thrillers, including The Wife Between Us, An Anonymous Girl, You Are Not Alone, and The Golden Couple.
The Ever After again demonstrates Pekkanen’s ability to evocatively, yet sensitively, explore the intricacies of human relationships in a manner that both entertains and deeply moves readers. It is the exploration of a marriage that seems, at first glance, to be a fairly typical, solid, modern American marriage. However, emotional turmoil lurks beneath the surface.
Pekkanen’s says her inspiration for a book was a conversation overheard in a public place about infidelity in the age of technology. “Two women sitting close to me were loudly discussing the plight of a mutual friend,” she recalls. “I couldn’t help but get sucked into the story – and I knew I had to find a way to work it into a novel. Of course, my book is pure fiction, but the grains of the novel were planted on that morning.”
Josie and Frank Moore appear to be happily raising two daughters in suburbia. Josie gave up er career to be a stay at home mother, but still runs a business from home on a part-time basis. Frank works long hours and travels for business. Frank is a wonderful husband and father, and certainly does not seem like the kind of man who would cheat on his wife. Pekkanen describes the couple as a lot like parents she knows — “they’re overwhelmed, they’re doing their best, they love each other, they bicker too much, and they make mistakes.” She believes readers will “recognize some of the dynamics in the marriage.”
As noted, the story is set in the technology age. And even though Josie thinks that she and Frank keep no secrets from each other — after all, she knows all of his passwords, including the one for his email account and the code that unlocks his cell phone — she is devastated when she uses Frank’s cell phone and makes a shocking discovery. Gone are the days when suspicious spouses had to hire private detectives to conduct surveillance and surreptitiously snap incriminating photos. Now answers can be found in emails and on websites like Google or social media sites/applications like Facebook and Instagram. But how many questions does Josie really want to ask? Does she truly want the answers? She must struggle with those questions as she examines the realities of “ever after,” and whether there were signs and clues she missed along the way.
The central theme of The Ever After is, of course, trust. How it is established, what value partners place upon it, and its importance in their relationship. How it is broken and lost, and whether it can ever be reestablished. Notably, The Ever After is a mediation on that theme from Josie’s perspective. Although, through the characters’ conversations, Pekkanen gives some insight into Frank’s thought processes and motivations, it is primarily Josie’s story. And it is an intriguing, honest look at the complexities of marriage and how important trust really is, especially in an era when so much technology makes deception easy.
Once again, Pekannen has created characters with whom readers can identify and empathize, deftly painting a believable portrait of a marriage in trouble. Remarkably, although there is plenty of blame, there are no villains in the tale. Rather, it is populated by flawed human beings doing the best they can and not always making the best choices. And there is so much love — for each other and their children.
Pekannen says she is “drawn to the dramas and adventures of ordinary people” and in The Ever After she takes readers on an emotional journey with Josie and Frank. Whether their marriage with survive is a quandry readers will find engrossing and find themselves considering long after they’ve read the last page of The Ever After. Pekkanen hopes their story will “spark a lot of conversations, including some that might even strengthen the marriages of readers.”
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