The plot was plebian, the central theme, All For Love, who loves enough. Then there is the murderer who really isn't, his wife who is absolutely perfect in every single way and was dying of cancer anyway and sundry other characters all of them charicatures for their occupations. Her small show of self-assertiveness is quickly cast aside in favour of forgiveness and lurrrve. There is his wife, Allie, the submissive woman par excellence who held on to her virginity until she met her husband at 25 and whose every action is designed to please him. There is the adulterous husband who feels guilty about never passing up an opportunity to screw his wife's strange employee who wanders from town to town looking for love. The first half, which took me three days to read, established the characters, none of whom I liked. I had read four or five Jodi Picoult novels and found, from the first high of My Sister's Keeper it to be a slow, downhill road and this book doesn't break that path. It was better than ok, but I didn't really like it.

If there had been half-stars, this book would have ratedd 2.5. And how NOT to live your life – always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The only thing this book is good for is for seeing how NOT to react to a cheating asshat. Well, if my heroine is so hurt by these selfish misfits then why the hell does her HEA include a husband that does not love her, and chooses her only because the woman he loved? fuc*ed? left him? And ultimately, the mistress pretty much left the ‘hero’ (really….hero? Could he even be called that?) because she loved him so LITTLE that she would not have liked him to change-stop having his pristine life-and go with her.

Maybe I would have sympathizes if the husband and his lady love had some grand love story.īut they only had dysfunctional lust, and I read page after page wondering why these two people even LIKED each other. So, what happens when the cheater is not redeemed? What happens when he talks to a man that killed his dying wife out of love and say ‘How did you ever let her go?’ not because he is thinking about his wife, but because he is thinking about his lover? Well, I know a lot of people that think a cheater romance can have a redeemable cheater that groveled and realized his wrong doing and that that would make it all alright. I was supposed to understand him.īut all I could think was: Wow, you are every woman’s nightmare husband!Īnd the ending? His wife talking him back?

Mercy by Jodi Picoult