A review by jeffmauch
The Arrangement by Sarah Dunn

2.0

Once you know the premise of this novel, it pretty much goes exactly as you’d expect. Two well intentioned adults in a fairly good marriage going through a rough couple years and they adapt to having an autistic child that is more than either of them can handle is a plausible premise for experimenting with an open marriage I guess, but even then it seems to be accepted without much thought. I personally didn’t like the use of the child as the fulcrum for their current difficulties, while they don’t blame the child outright, it’s clear that it’s the biggest factor in this concept. I don’t have to even say what happens in the end as this novel is incredibly predictable. Sure there are slight twists here and there, but for the most part you see it all coming. I think my biggest difficulty with it was the side character they it seems the author kept feeling a need to tie into her story line, it’s not that they were poorly written or anything, it just detracted from the main plot a bit and I think was simply used as a comparison tool to show that other marriages can have crazy issues as well. Overall, this book was average at best and really lacked believability. It’s an easy read, but I found it’s issues too distracting to even try to enjoy it and I would skip it altogether.