We Were Never Here by Andrea Bartz

We Were Never Here by Andrea Bartz

Read by Becca Tobin

Published August 2021 by Random House Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary:

Emily is having the time of her life—she’s in the mountains of Chile with her best friend, Kristen, on their annual reunion trip, and the women are feeling closer than ever. But on the last night of the trip, Emily enters their hotel suite to find blood and broken glass on the floor. Kristen says the cute backpacker she brought back to their room attacked her, and she had no choice but to kill him in self-defense. Even more shocking: The scene is horrifyingly similar to last year’s trip, when another backpacker wound up dead. Emily can’t believe it’s happened again—can lightning really strike twice? 

Back home in Wisconsin, Emily struggles to bury her trauma, diving headfirst into a new relationship and throwing herself into work. But when Kristen shows up for a surprise visit, Emily is forced to confront their violent past. The more Kristen tries to keep Emily close, the more Emily questions her motives. As Emily feels the walls closing in on their cover-ups, she must reckon with the truth about her closest friend. Can Emily outrun the secrets she shares with Kristen, or will they destroy her relationship, her freedom—even her life?

My Thoughts:

Some mystery/thriller books that hold up long after they're first published. Despite getting great reviews, I'm not sure this book will be one of those, although it's certainly a wild ride. 

Emily and Kristen become best friends in college and, because they both have families their in no rush to spend time with, they'll travel the world during breaks from school, trips that continue years after they've finished school. But as a trip to Chile devolves into burying a body in the middle of nowhere, Bartz gradually reveals that this is not the first time these two young women have found themselves getting rid of the body of a man who attacked one of them only a year earlier. And here's where I first started having problems with this book. 

If you'd found yourself hiding the body of a man because you felt certain that a foreign justice system wouldn't buy that it was self-defense, how quickly would you be willing to travel to another foreign country? Even if you're answer is a year, and even if you're not yet thirty-years-old, would you even remotely considering going to your room with a total stranger in yet another foreign country? Or even in the same city you live in, for that matter? 

The two young women head home, Emily to Milwaukee, Kristen to Australia WITH A FAIRLY LARGE PIECE OF EVIDENCE IN HER LUGGAGE!!! Ok, yeah, you don't want it lying around to implicate you. But maybe drop it in the trash in the airport? These are only a couple of the things that raised questions for me within the first 100 pages of the book. Even after the young ladies returned home, there were so many times I wanted to slap Emily to wake her up. 

Normally I'd feel bad if I gave away this much about a mystery novel, but the publisher's summary gets you well into the book before they decide they've finally given you enough to lure you in.

Here's the thing, though - even with all of the issues that I had with this book, I raced to make sure I finished it before it automatically was returned to the library because I really needed to know how Bartz was going to resolve this. Was Kristen gaslighting Emily? Had Kristen killed before? Or was Emily burying memories that would acquit Kristen? The tension ratchets up and up and there seems to be no way either of these young women is getting away with what they did in Chile. Bartz did manage to keep me wondering until the end and she managed to throw in a couple of surprises I did not see coming. 

The verdict? Despite all of the issues I had with this one, there was still enough here to keep me reading and there's certainly a lot that book clubs would find to talk about. 

Bonus for me: Emily lived in the very neighborhood that my son and his wife lived in when they were in Milwaukee, she went to a beach we'd been to, and Bartz described the city in very much the same way that I would describe the downtown. It's always good to find that kind of connection in a book. 

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

Published January 2020 by Random House Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary:

In the late 1930s, civil war grips Spain. When General Franco and his Fascists succeed in overthrowing the government, hundreds of thousands are forced to flee in a treacherous journey over the mountains to the French border. Among them is Roser, a pregnant young widow, who finds her life intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love. In order to survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them desires. 

Together with two thousand other refugees, Roser and Victor embark on the SS Winnipeg, a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda, to Chile: “the long petal of sea and wine and snow.” As unlikely partners, the couple embraces exile as the rest of Europe erupts in world war. Starting over on a new continent, they face trial after trial, but they will also find joy as they patiently await the day when they might go home. Through it all, their hope of returning to Spain keeps them going. Destined to witness the battle between freedom and repression as it plays out across the world, Roser and Victor will find that home might have been closer than they thought all along.

My Thoughts:

Isabel Allende is one of my favorite authors - she is superb at writing sweeping sagas that span generations of captivating, unusual characters set in interesting times and places, most often set, at least in part, in Allende's homeland, Chile. Six decades, three generations, much of the book set in Chile - in that regard, A Long Petal of the Sea is no exception. 

This is by far the most political of the books by Allende that I've read and, while I'm not opposed to that in a book, it did overwhelm the story for me. That being said, I learned so much about the Spanish Civil War and the politics of Chile and it was fascinating to compare both of those political environments with the current state of affairs in this country. Allende condemns both sides for atrocities they commit but as the child of a man who headed a socialist government, it's not surprising that the working class is portrayed more sympathetically. A warning for some - the Catholic church does not fare well in Allende's hands in this book.

You are accustomed to me saying that books would have benefited from a pruning; here, with a story this big, I felt like more would have been better. There would have been more room to include the political stories that Allende wanted to include (some for quite personal reasons - her father was the president of Chile for three years in the 1970's) while also allowing room to flesh out the stories of the families. There were characters I definitely wanted to know more about, characters I wanted to understand better. 

Mind you, this book was named as one of the best books of 2020 by a number of publications so what do I know? Perhaps they all appreciated a decades-long saga that didn't go on for 800 pages. And Allende absolutely manages, in these 314 pages, to explore so many themes, tell us so many stories, and, hopefully, have us wanting to learn more. 

Source: checked out of my local library for August's book club selection