I felt that Alice was a little too serene, for someone who had lost a husband, a child, and was in love with a man she thought she couldn’t have. And Piers may have hid his breaking heart a little too well, too. I saw that he blamed himself for the death of his wife and daughter, but he was too willing to repeat the same mistake (marrying the wrong person) again, even though Alice was no longer married. I too really like the theme of “best friends in love” but in this case, I felt that some ingredient was missing. I’m glad you enjoyed the book so much more, though.

This book worked for me because I thought that the middle section and ending were very poignant and moving. For me, it was worth sticking it out through the slow pacing in the beginning to get to the emotional payoff of the end.

I’m glad you and Aoife enjoyed this book. It didn’t seem like a terrible book to me, just slow and not very compelling.

I give a lot of good grades because those are the books that I finish reading, and when I wrote my opinion piece on DNF grades, many readers said that DNF reviews were helpful to them, so I’ve been trying to write a DNF review from time to time.

There are even weaker books that I don’t review because I don’t make it very far. Recently I picked one up and didn’t make it past page five. I had paid for it, too. There was no excerpt on the author’s site; if there had been, I’d have known that it wasn’t for me.

I can’t review a book like that because what would I review? Five pages? How much can I say about a book after reading so little of it? So when I make it a third of the way into a book before quitting as I did with this one, I feel I should probably do a DNF review, even if the book is not a terrible one.

If nothing else, it gives readers a sense of what works for me and what doesn’t, and whether or not our tastes will match up.