Rating: 
Summary: Story. Character. Eloquence.
Review: This book has it all. Beautifully written, the story unfolds when a widower named Glyn discovers an old photo of his wife holding hands with her sister's husband. An accompanying note indicates there had been an affair. This sets a series of actions in motion and has a great affect on the lives of several people.Each chapter changes perspective and allows for outstanding character development. By the ending, I felt as if I knew each character, including Kath-the dead woman in the photograph-quite well. I heard their voices, felt their angst and appreciated their need to obsess over an altered reality, if only for a brief time. A very quick read (only 231 pages), I highly recommend. From the author of "I'm Living Your Dream Life," McKenna Publishing Group.
Rating: 
Summary: The Photograph
Review: This is a rather slow building novel. The central theme is changing perspective over a period of time seen through the viewing lens of an adulterous relationship. To complicate matters, the woman is involved with the husband of her sister. Or to put it symmetrically the other way, the man is involved with the sister of his wife. The author's use of revolving narrators is skillful, which gives the reader material to ponder.
Rating:
Summary: Near the top of her form
Review: This is quite an extraordinary gallery of interlinked portraits. There's Glyn Peters, British landscape historian and television-academic, a man who has to know, in all cases, exactly what happened and why. There's his deceased wife, Kath, a woman of unnatural beauty to whom almost everyone was attracted and who lived her own life exactly as she wanted to, never planning ahead (and never had to), never working at a steady job, and who was the despair of her much older sister, Elaine. Because Elaine is a hyper-organized and very successful garden designer, the sort of person whose life is defined by her work and who has no understanding of, nor sympathy for, people -- like her sister, Kath, like her husband, Nick -- who *don't* approach life that way. There's Polly, daughter of Elaine and Nick, a very "here and now" young woman working as a web designer who rather takes after her mother but who also doted on her radiant, fun-loving aunt. And there's Oliver, Nick's ex-partner in their failed specialty publishing firm. It was Oliver who innocently took the photo that showed Nick and his sister-in-law secretly holding hands, which he forwarded to Nick, which Nick sent on to Kath -- assuming she would destroy it. But Kath thoughtlessly tucked it away to be found by Glyn years later. And Glyn now has a new project: Assembling all the data he can ferret out on his late wife's life while he was away attending conferences and doing research. Were there other men in her life besides Nick? It doesn't matter that it all happened fifteen years ago: He must know. And the repercussions of his investigation on all involved are considerable. But it appears that no one who knew Kath *really* knew her. Lively's exquisite, highly readable style is guaranteed to keep you glued to the page and thinking about her characters and their stories while you're supposed to be doing something else.
Rating: 
Summary: Unremarkable
Review: This story had great potential, but I think that Lively's storytelling, in trying to be understated, leaves much to be desired as a result. The 2 star rating is for her "painting" efforts, in that she does write very descriptively, but the overall big picture is hugely disappointing. Until the last 30 pages, I was hard-pressed to find a reason to pick it up again. The ending was, of course, the most intriguing part of the book (yet still predictable and therefore somewhat anti-climactic), but the preceding 200 pages were an absolute bore.
Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly good read.
Review: What a great read this book is, with it's quality prose, credible characters, dry humor, and seamless narrative, which is actually a story and not simply an exercise in stylish writing, as too many books such as this, often are. It was also good to see it all done in under two-hundred and fifty pages, instead of the more customary four-hundred page - and then some - behemoth. My main bone of contention is the author's voice being too loud: her use of third person present tense omniscient viewpoint making the multiple character scenes rather muddy in their reading This was also a problem when a character was reminiscing, the present tense viewpointing, distracting in such close proximity to past tense musings. This execution does give an up-front punch to the prose, but it would all have read more agreeably as third person past tense, keeping the viewpoint tightly associated with the character. The benefit of this can sometimes be seen in sections where Oliver, for example, keeps his mind on track for a page or two at a time.
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