Review: This Year, Maybe

This Year, Maybe by Jenny Gladwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Three and a half stars.

Christmas isn't a good time of year for Kate. Two years ago her beloved father died on Christmas Eve. Last year her husband was killed cycling home on 1 December and this year the family's pet hamster has died. On the surface everything looks good for Kate (barring the deaths, naturally) a mother of two living in a large Edinburgh flat, her own interior design business, two gorgeous children, a loving mother and sister. Unfortunately, the reality is somewhat different. Kate is stuck in a deep hole of sadness, if not outright depression. Her husband Adam was not the successful financial wizzkid she and everyone else thought him to be, he speculated, over-extended and now she has no savings and a semi-derelict flat with no funds for the necessary repairs. Added to which, she has no clients, she's fed her children fish fingers every night for the past few weeks, and she's leaning heavily on her friend Nat and her partner Felix to pick the kids up, feed them etc.

Kate's mother Jean is at a different stage of grief. She's a regular attendee at a Grief Group and has started doing lots of new activities (pottery, golf etc) but still can't bear to get rid of any of her husband's possessions.

As another Christmas looms Jean and Kate are trying to make a new start, but with the PTA Christmas Fayre rivalries and shocking secrets being revealed this could be a Christmas like no other.

How often do I have to say I liked it but I didn't love it? Whilst I felt a great deal of sympathy for Kate while I was reading this, now I'm asking myself what she did all day long while the children were at school if she had no clients - lay on the sofa eating biscuits and wallowing I suspect. Also, from comments made by Kate's sister and some of the PTA mums Kate appears to be a femme fatale with men falling over their feet to help her, yet she's never really described that way and she doesn't read like that. I think the Jean storyline was kind of unnecessary and created a fairy-tale ending rather than something realistic which I thought was a pity. Overall, in the last chapter or two everything miraculously turned out all right - I would have preferred to see Kate slowly dragging herself out of the rut she has fallen into rather than a whole book of rut followed by a wham-bam recovery (if that makes any sense at all?).

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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