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A review by captwinghead
Unforgivable by Natalie Barelli
1.0
This bummed me out. This is the first of Barelli’s novels to lose me this quickly. The intro is a great one. It’s gripping and set a tone that left me excited. Unfortunately, the execution of this novel just left me annoyed and disappointed.
I’m not good at reading novels where women fight to retain trash. I suspect Barelli starts the novel with Jack being a terrible partner and father in attempts to make Laura’s doubts look plausible. He won’t help Laura handle things with Charlie’s school, he belittles her fears, he ignores everything Bronwyn did to upset Laura and he hardly spent any time with his child. I get that this was meant to make the reader think it was plausible he was a cheating asshole, but it just set up for one thing to be very true about Jack: he’s a terrible partner and father.
There are several points in this story where Laura does crazy things to keep him and I just don’t understand why. What was she holding onto? A man that allowed his ex wife to live in their home and treat his fiancée like a personal chef and housekeeper? A man that stood aside and let his ex wife bully his fiancée? Bronwyn’s actions were her own, but they would not have accomplished so much had Jack actually listened to what his fiancée was saying.
The fact that the “happy” ending is Laura and Jack getting married is baffling to me.
Story wise, there were too many things that were blatantly foreshadowed so the “twist” wasn’t really a twist to me. Bronwyn was too aggressively horrible for it to be plausible that she and Laura “made up”. The reveal about why Bronwyn hated her so much seemed to come out of nowhere. Perhaps because the past was mentioned so few times? Also, the second they talked about Jack and Charlie’s project with the motion censor cameras, I knew what was coming.
In conclusion, the end results were predictable and I found Laura to be too willing to ignore Jack’s many faults. So, I wasn’t rooting for anyone. Except maybe Charlie.
I’m not good at reading novels where women fight to retain trash. I suspect Barelli starts the novel with Jack being a terrible partner and father in attempts to make Laura’s doubts look plausible. He won’t help Laura handle things with Charlie’s school, he belittles her fears, he ignores everything Bronwyn did to upset Laura and he hardly spent any time with his child. I get that this was meant to make the reader think it was plausible he was a cheating asshole, but it just set up for one thing to be very true about Jack: he’s a terrible partner and father.
There are several points in this story where Laura does crazy things to keep him and I just don’t understand why. What was she holding onto? A man that allowed his ex wife to live in their home and treat his fiancée like a personal chef and housekeeper? A man that stood aside and let his ex wife bully his fiancée? Bronwyn’s actions were her own, but they would not have accomplished so much had Jack actually listened to what his fiancée was saying.
The fact that the “happy” ending is Laura and Jack getting married is baffling to me.
Story wise, there were too many things that were blatantly foreshadowed so the “twist” wasn’t really a twist to me. Bronwyn was too aggressively horrible for it to be plausible that she and Laura “made up”. The reveal about why Bronwyn hated her so much seemed to come out of nowhere. Perhaps because the past was mentioned so few times? Also, the second they talked about Jack and Charlie’s project with the motion censor cameras, I knew what was coming.
In conclusion, the end results were predictable and I found Laura to be too willing to ignore Jack’s many faults. So, I wasn’t rooting for anyone. Except maybe Charlie.