Generally speaking this isn’t my sort of book, but I was drawn to the setting of the Jersey Shore and curious how the author would use it to flesh out the story.

If you like sad books, this will be more to your taste than it was to mine, and it’s certainly a well written and interesting meditation on long term illness and grief and how one person’s health affects an entire family.

Runde did a good job with the setting, though I tend to think of the shore as a happy place and there’s nothing happy or joyful or “vacation-like” about this book.

At times what has happened to the family feels more off-putting and frustrating than just sad, which makes it harder to invest in them, but is also, I think, kind of the point regarding what this sort of illness does.

I was a little bit surprised how well it worked as an audiobook given the type of story it is, but the material ended up lending itself well to the format and the narrator does a fine job.