Bestselling author Patti Callahan Henry is back with a powerful novel about the stories we tell and the people we trust.

The Stories We Tell by Patti Callahan Henry

About this book: Eve and Cooper Morrison are Savannah’s power couple. They’re on every artistic board and deeply involved in the community. She owns and operates a letterpress studio specializing in the handmade; he runs a digital magazine featuring all things southern gentlemen. The perfect juxtaposition of the old and the new, Eve and Cooper are the beautiful people. The lucky ones. And they have the wealth and name that comes from being part of an old Georgia family.

But things may not be as good as they seem.

Eve’s sister, Willa, is staying with the family until she gets “back on her feet.” Their daughter, Gwen, is all adolescent rebellion. And Cooper thinks Eve works too much. Still, the Morrison marriage is strong. After twenty-one years together, Eve and Cooper know each other. They count on each other. They know what to expect. But when Cooper and Willa are involved in a car accident, the questions surrounding the event bring the family close to breaking point. Sifting between the stories—what Cooper says, what Willa remembers, what the evidence indicates—Eve has to find out what really happened. And what she’s going to do about it.

About the author: Patti Henry is a New York Times bestselling storyteller of eleven books, including Between the Tides, And Then I Found You, and Driftwood Summer. Patti lives in Mountain Brook, Alabama with her husband and three children, where she is crafting her next story.

Genre: Fiction/Contemporary

Would I read this book, judged on its cover alone? Yes, I like its shadowy nuances.

If this book were a movie, I would rate it: PG-13 for language

Reminds me of… Kristin Hannah

You’ll want to buy this book if … you enjoy contemporary women’s fiction with lots of relationship drama, a hint of the south, and a strong undercurrent of mystery.

Why did I read this book? For St. Martin’s Press for review

Would I read another by this author? Happily. I liked this one, in fact, much more than her last novel, which delighted many critics but somehow missed my mark.

My take: From its first pages, I was drawn into this story. Right off the top, I liked its title, premise, cover art, and the prologue, which was a terrific set-up for the story, hinting at oncoming conflict while introducing the main character. Nicely done. 

It never fails to intrigue me how subjective the enjoyment of a book is. What works for me doesn’t for you, and vice versa. Similarly, the same writer can hit my mark once but the miss it the next time. Or the other way around, which is what happened for me here. As a She Reads reviewer, I recently read And Then I Found You and wasn’t delighted with it. I didn’t connect with the characters–as I recall, I had a hard time identifying with some of the main character’s life choices–and consequently, the rest of the story fell flat.

So not the case for me with this story. In that elusive way that is such a big part of bookish magic, the combination of conflict, characters and setting hit me in all the right places. This, even though Christianity is stereotypically portrayed in a very negative light (the sisters, Eve and Willa, endured childhoods damaged by all the wrong, hypocritical ways religion can manifest in human beings), and even though I wasn’t in total agreement with Eve’s choices, I could at least understand them. And–more importantly from a literary point of view–wanted to stick with her until she reached them.

Anyway. I’m getting perhaps a bit off the track here. I liked this book. I liked Henry’s prose, which is straightforward yet written from a place of deep understanding and empathy which translates beautifully to the page. I liked the way she strung out the mystery until the end, and how I was really guessing who to trust all along the way, just like Eve. All in all, it was a book I couldn’t put down, which, by my definition, makes it a read well worth my while.

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Thanks to St. Martin’s Press for providing me a free copy to review. All opinions are mine.

End notes: Kimberley Freeman is another author I’ve read recently whose first book (Lighthouse Bay) I didn’t particularly care for but whose second (Ember Island) I did. It’s hard to say precisely why because they were really quite similar. How about you? Have you had a similar experience?