Beware of your host… #ThisIsNotOver by Holly Brown delivers a powerful, gripping story of two seemingly wronged women #tlcbooktours #review

About This is Not Over

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks; Reprint edition (January 17, 2017)

You’ll have your deposit within seven business days, just like it says on Getaway.com. I’ve put through a refund to your credit card for the full amount, minus $200 to replace the stained sheets…

Miranda

When 30-year-old Dawn reads Miranda’s email, she sees red. People have always told Dawn she’s beautiful, and she just hopes they don’t see beneath—to how she grew up, to what she’s always tried to outrun. She revels in her getaways with her perfect (maybe too perfect) husband, the occasional long weekend in luxurious homes, temporarily inhabiting other people’s privileged lives. Miranda’s email strikes a nerve, with its lying intimation that Dawn is so dirty you need to throw out her sheets.

Beware of your “host”

I wouldn’t have left a review at all, if I didn’t feel it was my civic duty to warn others…

57-year-old Miranda thought she’d seen it all, but she can’t believe her eyes when she reads Dawn’s review. She’s a doctor’s wife but she needs that rental money, desperately. People might think her life is privileged, but they don’t know what’s really going on. They don’t know about her son. She won’t take this threat to her livelihood—to her very life—lying down.

Two very different women with this in common: Each harbors her own secret, her own reason why she can’t just let this go. Neither can yield, not before they’ve dredged up all that’s hidden, even if it has the power to shatter all they’ve built.

This is not over.

This is so not over.

Purchase Links

HarperCollins | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Mama Says:

This book starts out full of humor, with moments of pithy, and sometimes controversial, musings on life and status.  Then it gets darker.  And more complicated.  Until it gets to a point where you think, I can’t stand to find out more, yet I can’t stop reading.  In the end, there were numerous gasp-inducing surprises, and some less-than-surprising revelations.  I felt the author really made an effort to give each woman, Miranda and Dawn, their own personality, their own view of the other person, and their own faults.  Neither was right, but neither was wrong.  You kept thinking one thing, along with one or the other of these characters, then second guessing yourself, and what you’d read.  There was quite a bit more moral ambiguity than I expected, which worked rather well in the context of this particular story.  It’s about more than a house, or a refund, or a disagreement.  It’s about what we can stand to lose, what we can’t fathom ever having to give up, and what we are willing to do to keep what we think we deserve.

4 stars and my thanks to Harper Collins and TLC Booktours for the review opportunity!

About Holly Brown

Photo by Yanina Gotsulsky

Holly Brown lives with her husband and toddler daughter in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she’s a practicing marriage and family therapist. She is the author of the novel Don’t Try to Find Me, and her blog, “Bonding Time,” is featured on the mental health website PsychCentral.com.

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