Any avid reader has a TBR list that they can’t possibly get through in their lifetime. (Those of you who may not be avid readers but read this to support me, I know who you are, and TBR stands for “to be read.”)

I recently decided to clean up my Kindle content a little. It started because I went into my account to remove an old device. Then I saw a title that I still had to send to my Kindle. And then I saw a title I wanted to remove from my account. And then…well you get the idea.

Two content categories house all the books on my Kindle: Books and Documents. Documents are the advance reader copies (ARCs) that I reviewed or plan to review pre-publication. Books are books (duh) that have been downloaded from Amazon.

I sent a text to Corinne and asked her how many books she thought I had in my Kindle library. She guessed 200, thinking it sounded like a lot. 🤣🤣🤣 The rest of the conversation went exactly like this:

Me: “Higher”
Corinne: “300”
Me: “Higher”
Corinne: “500”
Me: “Higher lol”
Corinne: “What 😄”
Me: “Lol”
Corinne: “738”
Me: “Cheater”
Corinne: “WAIT WAS I RIGHT”
Me: “But you didn’t count the docs. I thought you looked on your iPad”

That’s when she came out of her room. I seriously thought she had cheated, and she was seriously shocked that her random (fourth) guess was right on the nose. So yeah…738 Books plus 127 Documents. Now, Kindle tracks which books you’ve read, but it doesn’t tell you how many are read vs unread.

I know that all but 11 of the Documents are read because I know which ARCs I haven’t read for review yet. Books? I managed to remove six from my account. (Impressive, right?) Of the 732 remaining, I would guess that at least 500 of them are unread. I track most of my books on Goodreads. According to my profile, I have read 262 books, but that list includes the 116 completed ARCs as well as books I read before my Kindle days that I marked when I first joined Goodreads. So with just a little bit of basic math, 500 is probably a low estimate.😬 And honestly, there are probably plenty of people out there with a TBR list way longer than mine.

Am I going to stop downloading books? I get one free pre-release every month (occasionally two) with Amazon First Reads because I’m a Prime member. That’s 12+ books a year…so, nope. I get recommendations from friends…so, nope. I have favorite authors…so, nope. And I continue to write reviews for NetGalley…so, nope.

I’m not going to stop downloading books. I don’t know a single reader who would agree to stop adding things to their TBR list.

It’s kind of like making sure you have all your favorite snacks in the house. You never know what you’ll be in the mood for, so you need to have a little bit of everything. I never know what kind of story I’m going to be in the mood for, so I have a little bit of all my favorite genres available. Ok, maybe a lot of all my favorite genres, but who’s counting?

The book reviewed here sat on my TBR list for literally eight years and six days. When I sorted my books from oldest to newest, it wasn’t the top one that I hadn’t read, but it was the first one to pique my interest.

You could say that it’s been pretty well hidden for eight years.🤣 (Yeah, I crack myself up.) I’m glad it’s not hidden anymore.

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Book Review

⭐⭐⭐½
3.5 Stars for Hidden by Catherine McKenzie

306 pages
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Publication Date: April 1, 2014
This title was an Amazon First Reads selection.

Publisher’s Description

While walking home from work one evening, Jeff Manning is struck by a car and killed. Two women fall to pieces at the news: his wife, Claire, and his co-worker Tish. Reeling from her loss, Claire must comfort her grieving son as well as contend with funeral arrangements, well-meaning family members, and the arrival of Jeff’s estranged brother, who was her ex-boyfriend. Tish volunteers to attend the funeral on her company’s behalf, but only she knows the true risk of inserting herself into the wreckage of Jeff’s life.

Told through the three voices of Jeff, Tish, and Claire, Hidden explores the complexity of relationships, the repercussions of our personal choices, and the responsibilities we have to the ones we love.

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Main Characters:

• Claire Manning – lawyer turned daycare operator, married to Jeff, had previously dated Jeff’s brother Tim during law school, mother of 12-year-old Seth
• Jeff Manning – CPA, avid golfer, has always felt he was Claire’s second choice
• Tish (Patricia) Underhill – former golf prodigy, works in human resources for the same company as Jeff but in a different branch, married to Brian who is a doctor, mother of gifted 11-year-old Zoey who participates in spoken word competitions and writes poetry

     

An older bestseller from an author I have not read before, Hidden really tells Claire’s story but from three different perspectives: Claire’s, Jeff’s, and Tish’s. All of the perspectives are first-person, but at the end of the day, everything impacts Claire. Every thought, every action, every inaction impacts Claire’s story.

Claire’s chapters focus mostly on how she manages through her grief and her son Seth’s, her suspicions about her husband, her past relationship with Jeff’s brother Tim. We get snippets of her past—why she became a lawyer, how she and Jeff met, how she started taking piano lessons, why she started her daycare. But most of it comes into the story because she’s managing through her grief.

Jeff’s chapters relate to his relationships with his brother, Claire, and Tish. A dedicated husband and father, it’s clear he supports Claire and Seth, that he’s devoted to his family. He’s a bit of a flirt, but he’s focused mainly on his job, his family, and his golf game…until he isn’t.

Tish’s chapters create the questions.

I waffled a bit on how to rate this. I leaned toward 4 stars at the beginning. The chapters drew me in, I wanted to keep reading. The characters intrigued me. And then there were the questions I wanted answers to. Was Jeff’s death a murder or an accident? Who’s hiding what secrets? Did they or didn’t they? All questions that get answered by the end.

Then I thought about going down to 3 stars. The chapters were numbered and titled but didn’t offer any kind of timeline. Some of them were in the present, some were in the past. Jeff’s were clearly in the past since he dies in the Prologue. But throughout the rest of the book, some of them were in the present day, some were a couple weeks ago, some a year ago, some several years ago. There did not seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, and it confused the story. And it took a really long time to get to the confrontation. I kept thinking it would come sooner, create more conflict.

What further complicated the timeline was that the chapters didn’t indicate at the start who was speaking. As a reader, you figure it out with context clues. That said, there was an entire chapter that I thought was Claire, and it was Jeff. It was a chapter about when their friend Rob died, and the narrator and Tim were in college. I just assumed it was Claire because Claire and Tim dated in college. It wasn’t until the last page of the chapter when the narration talks about making the PGA tour that I realized it was Jeff.

The reason I landed on bumping up to 3.5 stars is that the resolution on this reminded me of the movie Intersection (a 5-star movie if you haven’t seen it). “Richard Gere portrays Vincent Eastman, an award-winning architect whose personal life is on shaky ground. Separated from his beautiful but aloof wife (Sharon Stone), Vincent has an affair with a joyful and passionate writer (Lolita Davidovich) whose love promises a new beginning. But Vincent remains emotionally torn between the two women, leaving his future happiness—and that of his 13-year-old daughter—hanging in the balance. As his relationships start to crumble, Vincent hurtles on a collision course toward the one fateful moment when he must confront his true feelings and cross the intersection.”

I won’t give away the ending of the movie, just like I won’t give away the end of the book. What reminded me of the movie is that the book ends with everyone having a different view of what happened, but everyone also has closure. It’s a tough resolution to navigate, but it works.

I’ll seek out this author again. This book has been on my Kindle for a long time, so I’m not entirely sure how early it was in her writing career. She has a new book coming out in August, so I might be reviewing Please Join Us as well. Maybe it will be another Amazon First Reads selection, and maybe I won’t wait eight years to read it this time.😏

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