Book review: Every Fifteen Minutes

Title: Every Fifteen Minutes

Author: Lisa Scottoline

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Format: Audiobook

Summary: Dr. Eric Parrish is having a bad month.  His relationship with his ex-wife is increasingly estranged and their informal co-parenting arrangement is falling apart.  To make matters worse, he was just accused of sexual harassment by a Resident who is mad that Dr. Parrish rebuffed her advances.  Oh, and a patient of his may have murdered somebody and because Dr. Parrish won't violate doctor/patient confidentiality, he's considered a suspect as well.  Dr. Parrish is having a hard time getting anybody to believe him.  Can he clear his name?

Review:  Dr. Parrish sure sticks to his guns when it comes to sticking to doctor/patient confidentiality.  I would love to know if he was right in not sharing what was discussed in his sessions with his patient Max.  I remember when I was listening to this book that I kept thinking, "I think I would sing like a canary."  Not that there was any concrete proof that Max did anything, it was all very circumstantial.  Of course, I would have also lawyered up quicker than Dr. Parrish did because everybody knows you can't trust detectives to actually listen to you.  Poor naive Dr. Parrish.  They're there to solve a murder and Dr. Parrish did look kind of guilty himself, although again, for circumstantial reasons.  Anyhoo, it all worked out in the end.  The twist at the end was kind of fun, but all in all, I think my general dislike of Dr. Parrish led me to give this book three stars over four.  I leaned toward four stars, but this was a good book, not a great book.  

Time to write: 5:03

  

Book review: You Should Have Known

Title: You Should Have Known
Author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Summary: Grace Sachs has an enviable life--she lives in Manhattan with her pediatric oncologist husband and son.  A successful therapist, her first book, You Should Have Known, is about to be released.  The premise of her book is that women generally have only themselves to blame when their relationships begin to fall apart.  Grace argues that problems of infidelity or poor money management or emotional unavailability are obvious very early on, but women have a tendency to overlook these things.  In other words, they should have known.

When the mom of a kid at the school that Grace's son's attends is murdered, Grace is stunned when the cops show up at her door asking the whereabouts of her husband.  He could never do such a thing--he's a pediatric oncologist loved by his patients and their parents.  Turns out, he's also a sociopath.  Grace's life as she knows it disintegrates.

Review:  When I read books like this I can't help but wonder what I would do if I were in the same situation.  Inevitably, the women in these books seem to have more resources than me.  In Grace's situation, she has the luxury of escaping to her summer place in Connecticut, where she takes the next few months off so she can process what has happened and what her next steps will be.  Granted, the summer place isn't winterized and Grace and her son end up moving there in the winter. So they have that to deal with.  But both their Manhattan apartment and the Connecticut summer home are paid for because they've been in Grace's family for years.

I know I shouldn't take these books so literally--they're fiction.  But I can't help it.  In Grace's defense, she states a few times in the book that they couldn't afford their Manhattan apartment if they had to buy it with their salaries. But she still has it.  And yes, I realize these people aren't real.  But it's this inability for me to relate to her convenient financial situation that led me to give this four stars over five.  If my husband turned out to be a sociopath, I would still have a mortgage to pay with two kids in daycare.  I wouldn't have the ability to run away to our summer place.  If I was lucky I'd have friends that would let me stay at their summer places, but I'd still need to work to pay for the aforementioned mortgage and other bills.

The rest of the book was great.  There's the right amount of buildup to Grace's discovery, and her reaction feels real and raw.  But I just couldn't get past my frustration (and envy?) that her financial situation oversimplified things for me.