You know the saying “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree?” This is a play on that – about family ties and how we often feel tied to our parents. This book, written by Liane Moriarty, author of Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, looks at relationships with parents, children, and siblings, and how the people we love most can hurt us the most deeply. I struggled to get into this one at first, but I felt the same way about Nine Perfect Strangers when I read that one. Once the characters had been established, the story picked up and I struggled to put it back down.

Stan and Joy Delaney are fixtures in their community. Having raised four children and run a top tier tennis training facility, they are well-known and liked. After fifty years of marriage, they have finally sol their tennis school, and are starting to live out their retirement together. It should be the best time of their lives, right? But why are they so miserable?

The four Delaney children—Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke—were tennis stars in their own right, yet as their father will tell you, none of them had what it took to go all the way. But that’s okay, now that they’re all successful grown-ups and there is the wonderful possibility of grandchildren on the horizon.

One night a stranger named Savannah knocks on Stan and Joy’s door, bleeding after a fight with her boyfriend. The Delaneys are more than happy to give her the small kindness she sorely needs. If only that was all she wanted.

But when Joy mysteriously disappears, Savannah is nowhere to be found, and Stan somehow seems like the most likely subject. Will his children come to his defense? In any case, all the Delaney children will start to reexamine their family history in a whole new light.

xoxo