I’m a Liane Moriarty fan but didn’t love Nine Perfect Strangers. What did I think of her latest, Apples Never Fall? I will tell you! Check out my review of Apples Never Fall!
Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty
Published by Henry Holt on September 14, 2021.
Review of Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty
I’m a fan of Liane Moriarty books. I really enjoyed The Husband’s Secret and, of course, Big Little Lies. (I enjoyed Nine Perfect Strangers to a point but then at the end things got way too out-there for me.) I also reviewed her latest, Here One Moment.
I think Moriarty’s strengths are being able to juggle a large cast of characters and give them all their part in the story, showing them as individuals and also skillfully portraying the complexities of a larger group dynamic, whether that be a family, or a group of friends or neighbors. She’s also great at plotting.
I think that Apples Never Fall was true to form. It’s a story about a large family (parents and four grown children) and does a great job of showing how complicated both romantic and family relationships are. How someone can hear a casual remark made by a family member and seethe about it for decades. How you can love someone and also be completely annoyed and exasperated by them.
I liked seeing older characters in Apples Never Fall. Joy and Stan are in their late 60s and were at the center of the story.
What disappointed me was that Apples Never Fall seemed to promise to be a domestic thriller or at least a mystery and then wasn’t really. At least not in then same sense that Big Little Lies was a mystery. By the end I felt a little bit cheated.
I had a bunch of theories about Apples Never Fall, all of which were wrong (you can read them in my Apples Never Fall spoiler post). And some of the things that did transpire, while not as completely bananas as the events in Nine Perfect Strangers, depended a lot on multiple coincidences. I was describing the ending to someone who started laughing at one point. Me: no, seriously!
If you like the domestic part of a domestic thriller and have loved Moriarty’s books that focus on the complicated aspects of relationships, I think you will enjoy Apples Never Fall. But I think if you go in expecting a mystery or a darker story in the vein of Big Little Lies, you might be disappointed.
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Um…coincidences I can stomach, but too many of them? It’s also unfortunate that the book was pitched as something it really isn’t, but of course marketing strategies aren’t in the author’s hands. It does sound like an interesting book regardless.
About your comment system: I’m having an issue that I also have with a bunch of other WP blogs (but not all of them). I can’t seem to comment via Google – it says that “Google failed to return an expected code”. The other bloggers I alerted about it weren’t able to work out the issue.But I found out that, if I click on the WP icon (which I tried once just for kicks) and THEN I choose Google as my comment anchor, it works! That’s what I’m doing right now.
Hi and sorry about that. I seem to have not great choices re: commenting: 1) native WP comments, which means massive spam, 2) something like Disqus, which apparently slows down your blog and targets users for ads, 3) the plug-in I was using, which suddenly started glitching after an update or 4) Jetpack, which I am using now. UGHHH hoping that my former plug-in straightens out their issues and I will go back to that.
Yeah, I never think that is a good idea!
Just trying to see if commenting via Twitter works…don’t mind me…
Yes!
I came here to read the rest of an excerpted comment from a reader that was forwarded to my email. I don’t see that post (Amy) here. Leaving this note in case it has something to do with your commenting system problems.
Thanks, Jill. I’m so sorry and if anyone else is having comment subscription problems I really appreciate the feedback. Figuring out commenting (fighting spam, allowing notifications) is one of the more difficult parts of running a blog and I like to have the best possible solution.