Kristie's Reviews > If We're Being Honest

I enjoyed this story, but there was simply too much to keep track of. It starts out with an info dump of characters and it was immediately difficult to keep track of who was who. I had to continually refer to the family tree up until around the halfway point just to remember where the character fit in the story and what their relationship was to the person they were with. Was it a child, grandchild, neighbor, friend of the family, sibling, cousin...? It just took too long to get it all straight because the information didn't slowly build, but was given to you all at once.

This little family tree helps quite a bit to reference (repeatedly) until you get all the characters sorted.



In addition, each character has their own story line. So, there is a lot of drama going on. You need to keep track of who is worried about (view spoiler)[their online presence vs a pregnancy vs their marriage vs their sexuality, etc. (hide spoiler)]

I love a character driven novel, but because I was still trying to keep the characters straight when all the drama was going on I just felt a bit confused for the first half of the book. Imagine just being dropped into this big family at a gathering (funeral) and immediately needing to figure out the relationships, back stories, & personalities of all the members of that family, plus a few outsiders.

Overall, I think this could have been a better novel if the pacing was fixed and characters were introduced more slowly.

On a side note - I listened to part of the story on audio and it was more difficult to keep track of that way. You had the benefit of being able to look at the family tree while listening, but the transitions weren't smooth so half the time you didn't know right away who was narrating or even catch that the narrator just changed. I would definitely recommend the physical book for this one if you want to give it a try.