FICTION

I’d Give Anything

Morrow. May 2020. 272p. ISBN 9780062844484. $27.99. F
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Teenager Ginny Beale was wildly creative, adventurous, and incredibly loyal to her brother and her three best friends, but that all changed the night she learned a devastating secret about the fire that killed her best friend’s dad. Twenty years later, Ginny discovers another life-changing secret: her nice, dependable husband has been fired from his job as the result of a dalliance with an 18-year-old intern who is only three years older than their daughter, Avery. Ginny immediately takes action to spin the story and try to protect her daughter, who already has issues with anxiety and insomnia. In the midst of this crisis, Ginny also has to grapple with her dying mother, another relationship fraught with issues. Then when Avery finds her mom’s teenage journal from 1997, Ginny has to face her deepest secret again and finally confront the past.
VERDICT Alternating viewpoints, from the journal entries to Ginny and Avery in the present, give the story more perspective and slowly build the tension as the truth of what really happened 20 years ago is revealed. Smart prose and sharply drawn characters set this domestic drama apart in best-selling de los Santos’s latest (after I’ll Be Your Blue Sky). [See Prepub Alert, 11/11/19.]
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