Story for the Week
I gave my daughter a concussion. Yes, I have parental guilt. Whether it lasts a lifetime remains to be seen, but it’s lasted a few years now, so….
Something it’s good to know about me as you read this post: I don’t like to wait, and I don’t like to be late. I have often said that Corinne has no sense of urgency. (She inherited that from her dad.) What I didn’t realize is how often I tell her to hurry up.
In preparing for this post, I had to go back to look at some text messages, one of which I knew included the phrase “hurry up” (in all caps). When I searched my messages, I scrolled through page after page after page of messages telling her to hurry up—usually because we were watching a show I wanted to finish or we were getting ready to go somewhere. In my opinion, she needs to learn to have a sense of urgency. But honestly, I could probably practice a little more patience. Clearly, this is who she is. 🤷🏼♀️
The day of the concussion incident, we went to see Cats at the theater with our friends Aly and Stephanie. I hadn’t seen it since college but always loved it. I even had a black and white cat I named Mr. Mistoffelees. The only thing Corinne and Aly knew about it was the horrible movie version. Stephanie and I convinced them to go anyway.
Before the show started, everyone took a trip to the restroom. Corinne had eaten something that obviously didn’t agree with her (if you get my drift) and was taking longer than anticipated. She texted that we might need to go in without her. For some reason, they were checking tickets at the doors to the house to seat people, so I told her I would transfer the ticket to her in the app. I also reminded her that they only let you into the main house between numbers.
A couple minutes later, she texted asking if we minded waiting. She was coming, and the app wouldn’t open because she was on the lower level of the theater. Now remember what I said about not liking to wait…and I definitely don’t want to walk into the theater after the show starts. I don’t even like to arrive at movies after the previews have started.
Corinne’s father was famous for making us wait—changing his mind at the last minute when we were going out—and he didn’t care at all about being late anywhere. So while I stood there waiting to go into the theater, my back hurting, my knees hurting, thinking about how Dennis always made me late, I grew more and more annoyed.
That’s when I sent a text in our group chat with Stephanie and Aly saying “HURRY UP.”
Corinne arrived a few seconds later and told us that she tripped up the L-shaped stairs and ran into the wall on the first landing…head first. I still felt annoyed but asked if she was ok. She said yes, but the longer we sat in the theater, the more I knew she was not really ok. Her eyes were glassy, she felt dizzy when she stood up, and I could tell she was trying really hard not to cry.
She stayed home from school that Monday, and I took her to immediate care because she still had a slight headache. She still felt nauseous and a little dizzy, so I was pretty sure she had a concussion. The doctor confirmed it, and he even sent us for a head CT since she was still symptomatic a few days after it happened.
I felt horrible. She rushed up the stairs because she knew I was annoyed. She tripped because she was rushing. And she literally ran head first into the wall. Because I told her to hurry up. I may not have been the one to trip her, but to this day, I still feel completely at fault because even the clumsy genes come from me.
And Corinne doesn’t let me forget it. 🤣 I find comfort knowing that she will know her own parental guilt someday. It’s not really something you can avoid when someone you love gets hurt. Even if you don’t play a key part in it like I did in this case, you feel like maybe you could have done something to prevent it. It wasn’t the first time she got hurt on my watch. It certainly won’t be the last.
The parental guilt is real, and she takes full advantage…because a lot of times, that’s what families do. I was reminded of that when I read the book reviewed below. One of the main characters, when faced with a challenging family situation, thinks to herself:
“She needed to think carefully. Tread carefully. Everything she said or did now would be remembered for ever. Families were like that. Words intended as jokes or spilt through embarrassment became folklore. Connie thought parenting was a little like being placed under arrest. You do not have to say anything, but anything you say may be given in evidence against you. Ad infinitum.”
She’s not wrong. And someday…someday, Corinne will know that too. 😉
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐
3 Stars for Our Beautiful Mess by Adele Parks
448 pages
Publisher: Harlequin Trade Publishing | Park Row
Publication Date: February 10, 2026
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Harlequin Trade Publishing | Park Row.
Publisher’s Description
Connie can’t wait to have all her daughters back home for Christmas. It’s not just the excitement of the girls being together under one roof; uni student Fran is bringing a new boyfriend to stay. The empty nest will once again be full of friends, family, and young love.
Yet from the moment she sees Zac, Connie feels a deep unease. Zac reminds her of the worst mistake she has ever made: a man whose charm and good looks nearly destroyed her marriage. Then, Fran announces she’s pregnant.
Reeling from Fran’s news and terrified that her past might threaten her family’s future, Connie desperately tries to navigate a path forward. But there’s a much greater menace looming, because she’s not the only one who has something to hide. Someone in the house has another devastating secret. A deception which will put everyone Connie loves in shocking danger, and one of them will pay the ultimate price.
************
Main Characters:
- Connie – mid-50s, married to Luke for 25 years, a prominent photographer who also works two days a week at an art gallery, family lives in Notting Hill
- Luke – mid-50s, married to Connie, an architect
- Fran – 21 years old, Connie and Luke’s oldest daughter, in her last year at university studying music, in a relationship with Zac
- Flora – 18 years old, Connie and Luke’s middle daughter, just returned from her first term at university
- Sophie – 15 years old, Connie and Luke’s youngest daughter
- Zac – 22 years old, in his last year at university studying business management, in a relationship with Fran
- John – mid-50s, divorced twice, successful businessman, Connie had a life-defining affair with him the first year of her marriage to Luke and almost destroyed her marriage
This book starts with a bang…literally. Someone gets shot in the prologue, titled “The End.” We know from the description that someone “pays the ultimate price.” The only character we know for sure is actually in The End is Connie. From there, the author divides the book into sections beginning with “Eleven Days Before the End” and counting down.
Some readers will love this book. For me, it fell a little flat, but it wasn’t a horrible story—thus, the three stars. Told from the perspectives of mainly Connie, Fran, and Zac, once we get to “The Days Before the End,” John gets some chapters thrown in. We also encounter a single chapter from Bear, who I didn’t mention as a main character…because he’s not. And I think the chapter from his point of view could very easily have been written from someone else’s. I didn’t see the point of including his point of view at all.
Connie only wants the best life for her daughters, and she’s thrilled that she’s going to have all three of them home for Christmas. So she’s thrown when Fran comes home pregnant in her last year of university by a man she hasn’t been dating for very long. Add to that the fact that Zac reminds Connie of John Harding, a man Connie considers her most beautiful mistake. Her affair with John the first year she and Luke were married nearly destroyed their marriage before it even got started. Fran and Zac believe they are completely in love, but both of them have secrets that would pretty much destroy them.
As written, this story is more family drama than thriller. It focuses way more on the decisions the characters have made than the action that takes place. There’s a lot of repetitive self-talk, and it probably could have been about 100 pages shorter. The author throws in a few twists that I won’t reveal here, but there weren’t any big ah-ha moments or anything that truly surprised me.
One thing that confused me a bit is that Fran’s chapters are all in the first person while all the others are in the third person…and I still have no idea why. Fran isn’t really the main character. It feels more like the main character is Connie. I would not have been surprised to have Connie’s in the first person.
I did like Fran’s character…at first. The author does a great job in the beginning of letting us know that Fran and Zac are solidly Gen Z. I actually made a note about how much I liked her in Chapter 4 when she says:
“Truthfully, the only two things I’m absolutely sure of in life are: A, that if there was a world where I had to eat one thing for ever (while somehow serving all my nutritional needs), it would be chilli-flavour Doritos; and B, Taylor Swift’s lyrics make her a modern Shakespeare. I find I have fluctuating opinions on nearly everything else in life. People who know what they think about everything terrify me.” That sounds very much like a 20-something.
But that’s almost where my like of her ended. I talked with my Gen Z daughter and a couple of her friends about some of the passages in the book because I needed to know if Gen Zs really talk this way among themselves. She said it sounded like a Gen X or a Baby Boomer author trying too hard to “speak Gen Z.” That is exactly how I felt!
As the book progresses, the author includes a ridiculous amount of Gen Z slang that just isn’t realistic because people don’t talk like this. While one of my daughter’s friends will regularly say “lol” or “brb,” those abbreviations are typically reserved for text messages. But with Fran, it is just so in your face that I became more and more annoyed by her the longer I read. In fact, at one point, Fran says, “Can’t you just call it coffee? Try and make it sound normal.” And I thought to myself, exactly!
- “…no cap, they have all put their hands on my belly and hiccupped in my face.”
- “It’s defo as good as I could have possibly imagined.”
- “If only he hadn’t given his deets.”
- “…before exclusive, then bf and gf.”
- “…the man with rizz.”
- “He sent over a drink, FFS, what century?”
- “…we were not official bf/gf…”
- “Not so much a PB more of a PW.” (For the record, I still have no idea what this means.)
- “She likes to drop hints that she ‘lived a bit’ before she married Dad. Vom.”
- “We are—or at least were—the definition of BFF; we have an AAA pass to each other’s every thought and feel.”
You get the idea. And that was just in the first half of the book. The more I read, the more I found myself annoyed at the writing than truly trying to enjoy the book.
Everything starts to come to a head about 70% of the way into the book, but again, that first 70% felt way too long. That point in the book is basically what would be the end of another novel, but we still have an entire novella to go (about 130 pages).
This was my second read of Adele Parks, and my second 3-star review for a lot of the same reasons. In that review, I said “It seemed like there were story elements that were intended to be surprises, but I had them figured out early on. The only thing that surprised me was the epilogue, but by then I was kind of over it. It felt like it took a really long time to get there, and honestly, I didn’t buy it.”
Fans of Adele Parks may enjoy this way more than I did. I wouldn’t call it a bad book. It just wasn’t great for me, and I likely won’t read her books again.
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