Alice is just 11 when her 15-year-old brother Robinson (Rob) disappears, a runaway who she never sees again until the funeral following his suicide years later. Over the years, she has convinced her husband (Walker) and even herself that Rob wasn’t that important to her, even though, as she gives his eulogy, she realizes this was never true.
In the present day, Alice is still with Walker (who is a stereotypical husband of means and a creep throughout the book,) running an environmental center that her husband paid to open as a project to keep her busy, (which sounds as condescending as it should,) and has two children and a dog. She is living the life she always should have aspired to according to her now-suffering-from dementia mother.
Alice is cleaning out her parents’ home, when she discovers a box filled with letters that Rob left behind for seven people that were never delivered, but none for Alice herself. The rest of the book is centered around Alice delivering the letters and trying to learn why Rob left and never came back for her.
This book has its sad moments, but I really enjoyed reading it. My favorite character was actually Alice’s teenage daughter, who was stronger and smarter than so many of the other characters, a trait not shown very often in female teenage characters in this non-YA genre. And I liked how Alice recognized her daughter’s strength and used it as motivation to start to take charge of her own life instead of being so fixated on outward appearances. I think the book would have been even more successful if the main characters were less stereotypical, less black-and-white in their thinking, and given more depth, but I still really enjoyed reading about Alice’s growth as a person (instead of just as a wife and mother.)
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark in exchange for my honest review. It has not influenced my opinion.