Ann Leary

Successful real-estate broker, family woman and raging alcoholic Hildy Good embarks on a life of denial and loneliness while resenting the intervention of her loved ones and becoming embroiled in a scandal in her New England town that involves two craggy seniors.

A Novel

The Good House

Melissa Palmer

Book #86 Read in 2012
The Good House by Ann Leary

Hildy Good is a descendant of Sarah Good, Salem witch. Hildy's curse is alcoholism. Her family stages an intervention and sends her to rehab. Little do they know that after rehab, Hildy drinks alone at night from the bottles in her cellar, while declaring herself alcohol free. But Hildy cannot pull off this farce forever, and it eventually all catches up to her. Along with Hildy's story, the novel also details an affair between Peter and Rebecca, the trials of a couple with an autistic son and the other happenings of the small town.

I liked the writing of this book. Leary is good at description of both character and setting. Hildy was a character that I went back and forth between liking and hating. Liking won out in the end. The book was a bit slow in the middle but quickly accelerated and kept my interest until the end.

I received a copy of this book from BookBrowse for review.
http://melissasbookpicks.blogspot.com

Amy Maddess

I kept waiting for a climax that never came. This was disappointing, and made all the potential foreshadowing and side-plots seem more like filler because they didn’t lead to anything. There were times in the story that I became bored, but decided to hold on because it seemed like something life shattering was just around the corner. Though this book was great in the way that it chronicled the stages of alcoholism/denial, I felt that could have been done in less time and without the side plots (very random, unrelated and unresolved side plots). I like Hildy as an unreliable narrator, and I like how we are left to fill in what happens during her blackouts much like she herself would have to. However, some of the things she believes she experienced were a little far-fetched. A lot of her actions were very unsafe like driving after drinking and being around her grandson in that state, but these things are never touched on. I get that the authour may have attempted to imitate real life by showing the way that people ignore things that are awkward, and that doing this can have serious consequences, but I feel like, for Hildy, there were zero consequences. She never hit someone with her car, she never had a real fallout with someone in her life that lasted more than five minutes, and she never risked her career. We also never really heard much from her daughters about why she was sent to rehab in the first place. Just a mildly mundane, uneventful story for me. 

I liked the narrators voice, I could really visualize Hildy Good as a person. I also really liked the allusions to magic and witches, I like that this was a small touch that was simply a way of life and wasn’t overly expanded or focused on.

The Good House A Novel

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