There is no doubt that Katherine Dion is a talented writer. My book club read her debut novel, The Dependents, and our impressions weren't terrible nor were they terribly positive. One of our readers couldn't be bothered to finish it. I think in choosing the book we saw the words "summer read" in the reviews and thought "easy read", but when I google it now the accompanying adjectives are "best" and "memorable", which certainly isn't the equivalent to easy. I'm not sure how well I liked it. Expectations can ruin things.
My father-in-law recently lost his wife of 54 years, no small impact on a person, so the protagonist, Gene, won my empathy immediately. Watching Gene grapple with moving on without her, we get to really feel the complexity of memory. At times it's painful to watch Gene essentially deciding how to remember his wife, their marriage. I found myself wanting more of a concrete resolution - a reckoning - someone to step in at the end and tell us definitively what the past contained and all the little truths each person carries. But that isn't real.
I kept one quote:
Page 254: There was a kind of solace in the deepest misery, the comfort of confronting the worst possible thing that could happen to a person.
A summer read that isn't sunny. With a little time and reflection, Dion's story has grown on me.
