After Annie by Anna Quindlen

After Annie tells the story of three of the most important people to the titular character, Annie Brown, following her sudden death. Annie's husband Bill, their four children, and her best friend Annemarie, are left to grapple with the void left by her absence. Along with her struggle to move forward in a life without her mother at age thirteen, Annie's daughter, Ali, steps into the combination role of oldest sibling and caregiver within the household. Quindlen explores what the first year following Annie's death looks like for this trio of loved ones.

While I thought some of the dynamics explored between the characters and the flashbacks of Annie were thoughtful and heartfelt, this novel left a lot of unexplored emotions on the table. The distance between the narrative voice and the reader was far too removed for my tastes, preferring a deeper and more poignant excavation of grief. I wanted something far more personal and far more introspective, but instead I only got a vague sense of Annie herself and who she was to these three people in her life.

One of the problems that permeated the novel for me was this strange lack of anchoring on the timeline, which was one of the ways that kept me from really connecting. Annie, Bill, and Annemarie (along with the other adults) felt of another time period, like they were adults from a generation or two before mine, especially with as disconnected as they were in the wake of Annie's death. Bill, in particular, seemed completely devoid of any idea at all of how to communicate properly with his kids.

Additionally, there was an odd choice made for a classmate of Ali's — something that's both revealed and left unresolved in the end — that seems to be there for no particular reason other than a nodding acknowledgment of "some things just can't be fixed."

This one just never pulled me in, and I felt like an outsider the whole time.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This affected neither my opinion of the book nor the content of my review.