goodreads | The Last Anniversary - Liane Moriarty (Reply)

Title: The Last Anniversary
Author: Liane Moriarty
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 4/5
# pages: Audiobook ~14hrs
Date read: July 2019

It's been over 70 years since Connie and her sister Rose visited their neighbours and found the kettle boiling and a baby waking for her feed, but no sign of her parents. The 'Munro Baby Mystery' still hasn't been solved and tourists can visit the abandoned home, exactly as it was found in 1932.

But now Connie has passed away and the island residents ponder her legacy. Sophie Honeywell is looking down the barrel of her 40th birthday and still hoping for that fairytale ending. Her beautiful new friend Grace, the Munro Baby's grand daughter, can't tell anyone what she hopes for. It would be too shocking.

Meanwhile, a frumpy housewife makes a pact with a stranger, an old lady starts making her own decisions and a family secret finally explodes on an extraordinary night of mulled wine, fire-eating, and face-painting

I really enjoyed this book, and it was very well suited to the audiobook media. I liked Sophie, I liked Rosie, I didn't think I would end up liking Grace, but I did, and even the characters I didn't particularly like were still interesting, and I didn't dislike them either. I'd guessed the truth about the Munro baby long before it was revealed, but that's okay - I think we were more or less meant to figure it out along the way, so it wasn't set up to be this shocking surprise, but rather "of COURSE that is what happened".

I do wish postnatal depression wasn't such a taboo though... or rather, that some people didn't feel so ashamed about admitting to it, and others weren't so quick to brush it off as "hormones". It really bothered me to see Grace so clearly suffering from it (that's no spoiler - it's very obvious!), and having nobody else act upon it.

Not Moriarty's best, but quite high up there.