I found The Dependents hard to read. The writing was very descriptive, which I liked, but I felt the story dragged on a bit long. This may have worked better as a short story.,

A beautifully well-written novel that explores all sides of human relationships and evokes all of the emotions associated with that. A modern view of all things family.

I am sorry for not reviewing fully but I don’t have the time to read this at the moment. I believe that it wouldn't benefit you as a publisher or your book if I only skimmed it and wrote a rushed review. Again, I am sorry for not fully reviewing!

*Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.*

I thought this book had a unique story to tell. I was rooting for the main character to find himself and maybe some happiness to go with it. At times, I thought the book was a bit slow; maybe because I usually read intense thrillers?

The Dependents is one of those novels I want to love. The writing is exquisite. The premise sounds interesting with plenty of potential skeletons waiting for their reveal. Plus, I do love a good story that explores marriage and identity when done seriously and not as sappy, "and they all lived happily ever after" women's fiction.

Except, no matter how excellent the writing, it cannot disguise the fact that nothing happens in The Dependents. There are no secrets. The exploration of marriage and identity proves to be nothing more than one elderly widow questioning his memories upon his wife's passing, and he never comes to any satisfactory conclusion other than to trust his heart. It is all so frustrating because it could have been (should have been) so much better than it was.

On the one hand, I do not mind that I seemingly wasted my time on a story that went nowhere because Ms. Dion knows how to pen a sentence. Her writing is fluid as well as vivid with an ability to make a sentence bring to life a scene as well as play like music on the ear. This is a wonderful thing to experience and kept me coming back to the book time and again. And yet.

Let's face it. Even the most beautiful sentences in the world mean nothing if they do not move forward a story. There is only so much you can take of Gene's grief and reminiscing before you begin to wonder what the point of it all is. I never stopped hoping that one of these gorgeous sentences would result in a bombshell that would shake the story from its ennui. I kept that hope alive until the last sentence of the last paragraph of the last chapter, only to have my hopes dashed and for me to let out a rare cry of frustration at the pointlessness of it all.

The Dependents is a cobbling together of the same old ideas albeit with better-than-average sentence structure and effectiveness. Ms. Dion gives us nothing new when it comes to relationships, nor does she provide any stellar insight into marriage or the idea of identity. Because of her writing skills, I feel like it should have been a profound story, but I finished the novel feeling little to no emotion whatsoever. The wasted potential almost angers me I wanted more than I got and feel that Ms. Dion is capable of so much more than she gave. Hopefully, her next novel proves I am right.

I really enjoyed The Dependents. I thought it was a well written story and a great read for the summer! Will definitely be reccomending to customers!

What a debut! After the sudden death of his wife, Gene really begins to understand what his life is now, but also a lot more about his past. His relationships with his daughter are tested, and any parent or child is going to be able to relate. This books grabbed me by the heart strings and didn’t let go.

I would like to thank the publisher and Netgalley for the opportunity to read The Dependents. Unfortunately, I haven't finished reading the book, as it didn't grab me initially. I may go back and give it another try. I felt that there just was not enough to get me into the story quickly enough. I'll post any updates when I attempt to read it again.

Gene and his wife Maida and Ed and his wife Gayle have been close friends since college. They raised their children together and took vacations at Ed and Gayle’s beach house. When Maida dies, Gene re-lives their marriage and fears that it was not all that he had thought it was. He has never been very close to his daughter Dary and now they seem even further apart. He begins to doubt all of their relationships and a horrible suspicion begins to take root in his mind. Things are further complicated when his daughter convinces him to hire a caretaker whom he’s drawn to.

The characters in this book quickly found a place in my heart. This is a slow burning, deeply thought provoking, intelligently written book. This author is a fearless one, ready to take on issues such as how well we know our loved ones, where does our happiness come from, how to deal with the loss of a loved one, how well we remember the past. She uses great tact and caring in each sentence. This author is a force to be reckoned with and I have great hopes for her future in the literary field with such an auspicious debut.

Most highly recommended.

Gene has lost his beloved wife of 40+ years and now is reflecting on their lives together. They have one daughter. Dary,who is not close to her dad and who has a daughter of her own. A depressing subject as he looks back over their lives together.
I like the author's ability to be so in touch with his feelings, but didn't finish it; it was just too depressing for me. I read to be entertained and this was just bringing me down so I put it down.
Thanks NetGalley for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

I didn't really understand this book. I felt lIke it didn't really go anywhere and would have been better as a short story than a novel. The author has a wonderful way with descriptions, though, and the writing was beautiful.

The story follows Gene in the months after his wife's death. We catch glimpses of his relationships with old friends, his daughter, a housekeeper (?), and the summer house his family went to for decades. The problem is, even with all of the descriptions and details, I never felt like anything was fully explored.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced copy of this book.

I really have trouble seeing why the characters in The Dependents are friends. I realize that Gene is dealing with the death of his wife of 49 years, but I just do not see why he and Ed have been friends since college and I definitely don't see why he and Maidi stayed together for 49 years. I guess I mostly feel sorry for Gene. He certainly doesn't seem to have any spark in his life. That said, The Dependents made me think - of my own life and what I have accomplished, about what I feel passion about, and what is important to me.

On Goodreads, this book was described as "lyrical," so that set me up to think I'd be reading a more rich and varied prose, but the novel wasn't actually lyrical. It was rather straight forward. It started out a bit slow, with Gene and his daughter preparing for the mother's memorial. The novel covers the long friendship between the two main couples, and their families visiting a lake house for a couple of weeks each summer. After being married for decades to the same woman, Gene begins a relationship with the woman who he has hired to help him clean his house. The author does a powerful job describing his longing to be touched again, but the relationship starts and ends within three weeks, no explanations, she simply leaves the house and key and never returns. Gene doesn't tell anyone. Since he's facing a heart surgery, and fearing he'll die (his wife had knee surgery and died unexpectedly of a blood clot shortly afterwards), he heads off to the summer cabin alone and reads novels until his daughter and best friend find him, his best friend who he has begun to wonder if he had a sexual relationship with his wife (his friend answers his questions vaguely). For a first novel written while completing a MFA degree, I think the novel is quite engaging. I wish Ed's son would have been at the cabin, which is what Gene seemed to expect, when Gene was there because readers may have learned more about Gene, seen a different side of him, if we could have watched Gene and Ed interact, talking about the loss of their marriages, instead of just watching Gene start reading again. We certainly got the idea that Gene was hoping his daughter and Ed would become romantically involved since he was so troubled about her raising her daughter alone, which was a bit tiring to be reminded of throughout the novel.

I had mixed feelings about this book.. People grieve in various ways, but I found Gene's response to his wife's sudden death very sad, i.e. questioning his happiness in their marriage. It made for a good story but not one I could connect with.

Something was keeping me from writing a review of The Dependents by Katharine Dion. I loved the book. I found it thoughtful and moving and surprising, and somber and soulful. Why was I wordless?

It came to me that I identified too much with Gene, the protagonist, a recent widower who can't move beyond the loss of his wife of 49 years.

I have been married for 46 years. I was a month from my 20th birthday when I married. And for all our ups and downs, good times and bad times, my husband has been my best friend. I could feel Gene's loss and knew it might someday be mine, or my husband's.

"In some mad inversion of time, grieving his wife's death resembled falling in love."-The Dependents

After Maida's sudden death, Gene learns that his wife was in many ways a stranger to him. Who truly knows and understands another? We are like locked chests, filled with treasures and terrors we can not share. Gene depended on Maida, saw only her best, assumed she was happy. But now he wonders, did she love him? Was Gene her 'one and only' or merely a comfortable compromise?

In college, the shy Gene latched onto the more worldly Ed. Ed pairs with Gayle, who Gene also liked, and introduced Gene to Maida. It took Gene a long time to make a move to make Maida his girlfriend; he fell in love with her first. He was elated when she agreed to marry him. He was lucky, he thought. Their friendship has remained central to all their lives; they vacation together at the lake every year, raising their kids together.

Maida's dad set Gene up in his own shoe store business. Gene thought there was something honorable in fine footwear. But shopper's values changed, and the store closed. Maida had her work at the college child care center. Gene went to his old office out of habit.

Maida and Gene had a daughter, Dary, who has a daughter Annie. Dary is no comfort to her grieving father; she insists on an understanding of her mother that evades Gene's ideal. Dary insists Maida had other lovers before him and needs outside of her work as a childcare provider, wife, and mother. That she had given up some better version of herself to be Gene's wife.

As Gene begins to see who his wife truly was, he doubts everything he took for granted, struggling to understand how love was not enough, how he had failed the women he loved.

Gene must come to terms with the meaning of his life when so much had eluded him. When our life is nearing completion, should we second-guess our choices, regret the life we lived? Or realize it's what we wanted, after all.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

'No one couple had played a more important role in his and Maida’s lives than Ed and Gayle Donnelly.'

The lingering question is, what didn’t he know? After Gene’s wife Maida unexpectedly dies days following complications from routine surgery his world is upended. He remembers an argument about knowing, what is useful to know and what isn’t. In relation to death, it would only increase fear, change nothing but Maida, being more logical, preferred to know. Strange a year later she’d be dead. He picks at their past like an infected wound. Was she happy? He had never asked her about the ‘tucked-away life’ that is usually ‘secret even to oneself most of the time’, and also kept things from her.

Their dear friends Ed and Gayle are trying to keep him afloat in the waves of his grief, loss. But there is a story that makes him realize that the life they shared for so long had stories that he was never a part of, stories new to his old ears. How could that be? How could there be unknowable parts of Maida’s life never shared with him, her husband? An interesting line Gene says, “We exist without them, you know?” They do, but differently. Could his wife and Ed have been in love? Then there is his child Dary, who couldn’t be any more different from Gene if she tried. She is trying to be present for her father after the shocking loss of her mother, but it’s obvious from the start that her life is far more liberal than he can stomach. There is an ocean of distance within their relationship. Maybe he has oppressed her, does it in small doses with his unfiltered comments and questions. Strange to have a child so different from you, a child who was more her mother’s in some ways. Maybe her irritation, hurt, anger is tied in some way to never expecting to lose her mother, the parent she always chose. Their relationship has been strained from the start but it was during college he believes the real loss occurred. What happened? He doesn’t truly know his daughter’s inner life, which is interesting to note he is wondering if what he knew about the ‘internal life’ of his own wife and their marriage is genuine. How much changes, within in own hearts, if the big things in our lives are other than what we believed? Does love feel any different, is it diminished, in the end, does it alter if someone loved less? More?

It’s a sort of torture to live backwards, to try to come to knowledge when your beloved is no longer there to ask, confirm or deny whatever it is one is torturing themselves over. It’s also just as painful to try to change a relationship with your child when your wife is no longer there and you feel like a stand in. He is missing so much about Dary, when she is right is right there, as far from him as his dead wife. There is a cowardice in routine with our loved ones, in not risking breaking out of our set character.

Then there is Adele, hired to help him out so Dary can get back to her ‘self-serving’ life. He has always been sore about her having a donor to have her child Annie. Is it because it hurts him to think his daughter feels a father is ‘arbitrary’ and therefore, it means he didn’t matter to Dary either? Is Adele another chance to belong to someone again, so he won’t be drifting forever, someone who will touch him, be his constant companion as Maida once was.

Grief occupies more than it’s share of space in this novel. If Gene doesn’t understand the heart of women, particularly those he should be closest too, it’s more that he doesn’t really understand himself. His life feels like a blink, everything happened so fast, unexpectedly. Often the reality of life, of children, is nothing like you envisioned. Having a child who upsets everything he feels is solid and moral about the world, loving a woman who may have only shown her core to another, even if there was nothing sexual, this was not the life he thought he would own. Illness that steals in, he isn’t really ready, but we never are. He spends a lot of time torturing himself, wondering if he was conspired against by his wife and best friend Ed, his entire life! If his child is just another betrayal. I don’t know that Gene ever gets the answers, maybe being blind to the serious stuff is how he prefered to live. Why didn’t he ever have these deep conversations, aiming loaded pressing questions her way? Maybe there was nothing to hide, and it’s just his own mind eating itself. God willing this won’t be old age for all of us, wondering what was real, true. I have to say, at least for men my father’s age, I think in many families women have always carried the relationships and the many men would be unsure of their footing if their wife died first (in relation to the children, fully grown or not). I don’t know if it’s generational, and I don’t mean to discredit men and say they aren’t close to their children, but in many cases it’s mostly been on a woman’s shoulders to reach the depths of their children’s core, to understand and track their inner-life. Men sometimes find themselves lost at sea, whether relationships are close or strained, when they are widowed. Surely not true of every family now, but times were different when I was growing up. On top of losing his wife, he has to confront the reality that he and his daughter are strangers to each other.

A quiet, slow read about being forced to wake up in your own life, when your partner is no longer there to steer it.

Publication Date: June 19, 2018

Little, Brown and Company

The Dependents
I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Gene’s wife Maida has died suddenly after they were married for 49 years. They had one daughter, Dary, who is not very close to her Dad. Dary has a 10 year old daughter who was conceived via a sperm donor and Dary chose to be a single Mom. Gene and Maida have been friends with Gayle and Ed since their college days, vacationing together at a lakeside cottage and bringing their children up together, sharing life’s small and large events. The novel deals with Gene’s grieving, examining his life, his marriage, his role as a father and their relationship to Gayle and Ed. Were we happy, what is happiness is the main question throughout. Although the book raises real questions, concerns, I found it just so-so, the characters flat, can’t give it more than three stars.
Thanks NetGalley, the publisher and the author for the advanced copy.

Thanks NetGalley and Little Brown and Company for an advanced read in exchange for this review.


Gene's wife Maida passed away unexpectedly. As he unpacks what this means for his life, he finds himself thinking a lot of the past, relationships with friends, and his relationship with his daughter.

I had a difficult time connecting with any of the characters. I'm sure Gene was a nice guy, but I didn't feel anything described him as a warm character. It just felt that he was kind of existing and going through the emotions. At the end of the book, I didn't feel like I knew him at all, even though we had been through his past and his relationship with his wife. The book is written well with just enough to keep you turning the pages, but I was left wanting more. On another note, Gene has all these questions about his close friends and even wonders about a deep, dark secret that may exist, but the book doesn't really address it one way or another.

From the very first paragraph, debut author Katharine Dion, drew me in....
“Gene’s interest in other people lay primarily in the mystery of their happiness.
Happy children, happy parents tending happy children and small animals —had they always been such evangelists of joy? He now reserved a special kind of misery for the sight of a happy couple. This particular human configuration seemed to have been invented out of despair in everyone else”.

Gene Ashe’s wife, Maida died. It wasn’t cancer - it wasn’t expected. She had a knee replacement surgery. All went well. Yet a few days later she died of a blood clot.
They had been married 49 years.
I FELT THE SUDDEN SHOCK. I’ve been married almost 40 years- ( this Dec. is our 40th anniversary). I immediately wondered why did the author choose a ‘sudden’ unexpected death. She had a reason.

Everything about this novel - every character - the descriptive prose - invites the reader to SLOW DOWN. We are invited to contemplate a series of points of views.
This book requires some thoughtful reading.

Gene Ashe is grieving the loss of Maida. There are things he never asked her....like was their life - not outward life - but the life within - had it been happy? I wondered if he was asking himself the same question?

THIS IS AN INTROSPECTIVE QUIET BOOK - dealing with grief, loss, death, love, memories, friendships, uncertainty & questions unanswered, with considerably complex issues and thought provoking relationships.....and sadness.
ITS NOT A BOOK FOR EVERYONE... It WAS PERFECT FOR ME. I’ve been thinking about the characters intensely.....and our human dependency on one another.

Gene and Maida Ashe were best friends with Ed and Gayle Donnelly.
Ed and Gene met in college - before wives. Ed became a doctor. Gene owned an upscale shoe store.
These two families did everything together - vacation for ‘years’ at White Pine Lake, the Donnelly’s property on Fisher Lake. They had summer rituals: swimming- boating - fishing - birding - croquet - card games - etc. They shared responsibility for sick children - whiny children - passed kids clothes down to one another, etc. All the children were adults with their stories at the time of Maida’s death.

Gene and Maida had one daughter: Dary. She chose to have a child - Annie ( 10 years old) - without a man. There is friction between Gene and Dary. We learn some back story. Gene was nervous being around her when she was a child. Their relationship is complicated.
Dary is aloof and bitter towards her dad - partly we assume she felt judged by her choices by him....plus she is also grieving over her mother’s death. She is angry - wonders if her mother had enough solitude and personal pride about her life besides doing selfless deeds for other people. Her anger is directed toward Gene. As his daughter.... she wants to make sure he is OK, and hires help to come in a few days a week. She lives in California with Annie. Gene lives in New Hampshire.... but while trying to help dad, her cocky indignation spills right out of her mouth.

I think Dary’s hostility was - in part - had as much to do with how she felt about herself - and was grappling with issues that had nothing to do with her father -
much like what happens to all of us when we mis-direct our anger.

As for Gene - he didn’t understand why he had such a difficult time understanding his daughter.
“His whole life he’d been waiting for them to like each other. When she was a child, he thought for certain it would happen when she became an adult. When she was an adult he thought for certain it would happen when she became a parent. But it hadn’t happened, at least not the way he had imagined it would”.
However.......Gene also said this of Dary:
“It was a feeling he’d had his whole life, deeper than a thought, which was that there was nothing she could do to make him not love her — that no matter how many times she transformed herself, his love would transform itself to match her. This was what it was to be a parent—it was to give up control over your own love. To Love where sometimes you didn’t even like. It was something that could barely be expressed within yourself, and even then it made absolutely no sense”.

Ed and Gayle and three boys: Brian,( the oldest), and Michael and Colin. We get to know the boys a little - their wife’s - their troubles etc. - which by the way Ed didn’t have a great cozy relationship with Brian....
but....we spend more time looking at the two couples - Gene and Maida and Ed and Gayle. Each of their personalities are explored -how they lean on each other is explored - and for Gene especially—how all these relationships intertwine with his grieving process.

Gene question if many Maida really loved Ed.
So, Gene comes out and asks him....”did you love my wife?”
Ed says:
“There is a kind of trust that can exist between two people who don’t need much from each other—who aren’t in each other’s business according to the rules of their lives. Maida and I didn’t use each other up. We couldn’t. There was a deep fondness there. A genuine friendship”.

At the memorial....the eulogy speeches are each interesting.....by Gene, Dary, Gayle, and Esther ( an old friend of Maida). Dary and Esther’s speeches send Gene into his troubled thoughts even more. He felt betrayed by his daughter and confused and worried by Esther’s speech.

Adele becomes a new woman in Gene’s life - for awhile. It was sad .... because not only was Gene grieving over his wife’s death - he spent “fruitless” hours wondering why Adele had left him.

There are three parts to this novel.
Part three was so tender - We know Gene’s health is failing.
I read section three twice .....( cried in one part the first time). There were ‘many’ things I liked about it: BOOK TALK....literature....the aura of enchanting poems and novels which filled the human spirit. ......
and the surroundings of the cabin were lovely. I wanted to spend a week there alone with books and trees myself.
“The woods stretched in every direction that wasn’t watery. Large hemlocks, their sweeping branches quivering with deposits of new snow, greened the flanks of the mountain. The tallest white pines spread great brushlike branches over the valley, and the younger trees were naked of needles except on their uppermost limbs. The leaves of beech trees were dead but hadn’t fallen off yet, and they hung upside down like dried-out tawny bats. Some of the Pines had lost their bark and the exposed wood was as smooth as bone and the color of old bone. Still other trunks were splotched with medallions of lichen, their edges ragged and curling, their velvet the vivid yellow-green of a prehistoric thing refusing to die”.

There is some gorgeous writing in Katharine Dion’s debut novel — walking through the woods - down near the lake - to being inside the cabin eating grilled cheese reading Anna Karenina.....to intimate dialogues between characters.

I loved this deeply introspective novel. The writing is sensitive and evocative—
To me —-it showed the value of family, love, security, solitude, freedom,....and the welfare of others. It’s all important. We are dependent on all of these human needs.

Thank You Little Brown and Company, Netgalley, and Katharine Dion

Gene and Maida Ash were married for 49 years. Gene loved his wife very much, even if he didn't necessarily know how best to show it. But he enjoyed their life together, even if he felt that there were times where Maida didn't express herself fully or let him know how she was feeling—about him, their marriage, their daughter, anything.

He isn't sure how to handle his grief. His daughter, Dary, with whom he has never quite seen eye to eye no matter how hard he tried, returns home with her daughter to try and help him, and Gene and Maida's closest friends, Ed and Gayle, also provide assistance and a sympathetic ear. Trying to think of life without Maida feels strange, although perhaps less stressful at times, and he is unsure of how he will spend his time and energy now that he is alone.

"There were people who told him his grief would diminish, but he didn't believe them. That his father's death was still an experience reverberating inside him after all these years suggested that the distance a person traveled from death was just along a circle, and all it took was one new loss to show you that you were still traveling the same line."

As he begins to think about his life and marriage, he starts wondering if Maida was as happy as he thought she was, if she was actually satisfied with their marriage. He begins to question events in their past, things she said and did, and wondered if he was missing signs she was giving. What was the true nature of Maida's relationship with Ed, since it was Ed who introduced the two of them in the first place? Was she looking for Gene to be more, do more than he was? What is the source of animosity between him and Dary?

The Dependents shifts between the present and the past, providing a look at Gene and Maida's relationship from the beginning, and exploring how Gene tries to deal with the loss of his wife and the anxiety this loss is causing him, since he isn't sure what to think about their relationship any longer. You see Maida through Gene's eyes, and you see his earnestness to be a good husband, yet his initial awkwardness at how to initiate a relationship with her.

This is an interesting look at the cycle of grief, and how in an instant you can go from being with someone to their being gone. The book explores the question of how we can ever really know a person, even if we've been with them forever, and whether you should trust your memories or begin questioning things after the fact, and whether the answers to those questions will be helpful anyway.

Katharine Dion is a really talented writer, and she very effectively captured the emotions that accompany loss, and how the grieving person interacts with others. She also dealt with the struggle between acceptance of grief and still wanting more from life, and whether doing so is a betrayal of the person you've lost.

I struggled with this book a bit because I think it left a lot of questions. What were we to believe about Maida, in the end? Was she satisfied with her marriage and her life, or did she settle? Was there more to her relationship with Gene, or others? And why did Dary have such anger toward Gene? I didn't feel like these questions were settled, which left me in as much uncertainty as Gene, and that isn't entirely satisfying.

This is a good effort for a debut novel, however, and I look forward to seeing what comes next in Dion's career.

NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!