18/40: The Midwife's Confession by Diane Chamberlain

The Midwife's Confession by Diane Chamberlain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

From Goodreads:
Dear Anna,
What I have to tell you is difficult to write, but I know it will be far more difficult for you to hear, and I'm so sorry…

The unfinished letter is the only clue Tara and Emerson have to the reason behind their close friend Noelle's suicide. Everything they knew about Noelle—her calling as a midwife, her passion for causes, her love for her friends and family—described a woman who embraced life.
Yet there was so much they didn't know.

With the discovery of the letter and its heartbreaking secret, Noelle's friends begin to uncover the truth about this complex woman who touched each of their lives—and the life of a desperate stranger—with love and betrayal, compassion and deceit.

Before I start my review... I'm in a face-to-face bookclub! I'm in a book club online, so this is the first one where people meet in person. I'm super excited and really like all the women. Sister#2 asked me to join with her so I jumped at the chance. This is the first book the group picked.

Review:
This was really slow to start and left a lot of unanswered questions that may or may not have been relavent to the story, I'll never know. There are certain things that the author never went back to clarify. There was also parts that I felt had significance that were never elaborated on.

I normally enjoy books told from multiple perspectives, however this one had too many. It felt very disjointed for the first two parts of the book, and then moved into a flowing novel in the third part. Tara and Emerson both discover things about Noelle in each of their chapters. The thing that bugged me was they would discover something and then the next chapter would move on to something entirely different. Sometimes it went back to the big reveal, other times it didn't at all and just left it as something insignificant.
Having so many perspectives throughout the book I never really felt close or sympathized with any of the characters. There wasn't time to get to know any of them deeply. It was on a very high level.

I wasn't entirely sure who the main character was supposed to be throughout the whole book. And perhaps that was the point, there wasn't one. It became less and less about Noelle as it went along.

It was not what I expected after reading the synopsis.
View all my reviews