Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

Reading a debut novel is always exciting for me. Maybe it will be great and I will anxiously await the sophomore novel, and on and on, being a completist from the start! Maybe it will be very good and I can watch the author’s craft strengthen and develop from one book to the next. Maybe it won’t be a book for me, or at least not for me at this time, but there’s always something to take away from each reading experience.

Meryl Moss Media Group and Meridian Editions offered me an ARC of Diane Parrish’s debut novel, Something Better, which will be published on October 8, 2024. NetGalley facilitated my acquisition of the ebook, and I finished it last night.

I’m not really sure how I feel about the characters in this novel, but I am sure how I feel about the writing. The novel starts off with a bang, literally the first “chapter” gives us all the backstory we need for one of the female main characters, Annabeth. It’s a whopper of a backstory, and it is told in a very compelling way. Annabeth and I are at very different stages in our lives, but I still felt a lot of empathy for her and what she was going through … to a point.

Now, the other two main characters, David and Ruth, now, there’s where I feel like I don’t really know what I want to say. Like most marriages, with David and Ruth we see what is on the outside only. It’s like choosing a pastry from one of those glass displays. The prettiest one, with the perfect glaze and the GBD (golden brown and delicious, yes, I watch too much Food Network) color, is the easy choice. But once you get it home and cut it open, you find that it is dry and stale. You can microwave it for a few seconds to see if its freshness can be restored, but alas, it is too far gone.

The first half to two-thirds of the novel unfold slowly, although there is a very dramatic scene between David and one of his clients from his landscaping business. It is at that scene that the wheels come off of the bus (or the trailer as it were). David is shaken off of his foundation, and makes some very poor choices. Ruth is away on business and can’t bring him back to center. Annabeth is at the heart of all of this and perhaps it is she who loses the most.

There is an interesting thread to this storyline, that of faith and forgiveness. Ruth does a lot of praying, sporadically attending church services, while Annabeth’s new love interest, Theo, comes from a family who attends church services every Sunday and then over lunch, they discuss the scripture readings and the pastor’s homily. The Sunday that Annabeth meets Theo’s family, the topic is forgiveness, and a passage from The Lord’s Prayer. I found this thread to be quite interesting, given the series of events that follow, and wondering whether the path to happiness for these characters is possible with enough forgiveness.

This novel is rife with drama and some might find sensitive topics being explored: death and loss, drunk-driving, infertility, gun violence, divorce, infidelity. If these serious issues will negatively impact your reading, please be forewarned.

I enjoyed this novel, and I feel the weight of the lives of these characters upon me lingering still. I will be interested to see where Diane Parrish goes next in her writing life. Thank you to NetGalley and Moss Media/Meridian for the ARC.