Author: Wendy James
Publishing: 2012 by Penguin Australia
Genre: Fiction; Mystery
Progress when DNF'd: 42%
Format: Paperback
Source: Borrowed from library
Goodreads' Rating: 3.55 / 5 stars
My Rating: 💜💜
Goodreads' Synopsis:
The past isn't dead. It isn't even past..
Jodie Garrow is a teenager from the wrong side of the tracks when she falls pregnant. Scared, alone and desperate to make something of her life, she makes a decision to adopt out her baby - and tells nobody.
Twenty-five years on, Jodie has built a whole new life and a whole new family. But when a chance meeting brings the illegal adoption to the notice of the authorities, Jodi becomes embroiled in a nation-wide police investigation for the missing child, and the centre of a media witch hunt.
Did something sinister happen to Jodie's baby the night it was born? The fallout from Jodie's past puts her whole family under the microscope, and her husband and daughter must re-examine everything they believed to be true.
Review:
I can't review this book fully, as I didn't even get half-way through it. The Mistake has been on my Goodreads TBR shelf for years so I thought that I would give it a go when I found it at the library. The synopsis sounds interesting enough so I thought it might have been a good read, and it may have been if the story moved a little faster.
I just couldn't get into the story, or the lives of the characters. Jodie herself is a little odd. Angus, her husband is some big-shot lawyer that is suffering from frequent panic attacks. Her mother-in-law is a complete cow, her daughter is a teenager who is experimenting with pretty much anything and everything and who is a little off the rails, and her son who is really young so he is not in it all too much.
Jodie had a baby when she was nineteen and gave it up for adoption but the adoption was illegal. She really should have known better to be honest..you fall pregnant at that age and carry the baby to term, you would have the details of what you are planning on doing with the baby organised before you have it. I know she was scared and alone, but at nineteen, surely she had more sense than to give her baby to complete strangers on the word of a nurse who she didn't know. I'm sorry, I just don't buy it.
I did want to know what happened to the baby, but the story was just so slow and it kept jumping back and forth from present to past, and usually I enjoy that, however, in this case it was annoying. I really just wanted James to get to the point of her story.
I tried really hard to read this book to the end, but I just couldn't do it.,
Has anyone else read this book? What did you think?? I hope that others enjoyed it, but it just wasn't my cup of tea. I would love to discuss your thoughts and opinions though!
Thanks for reading my DNF Review of The Mistake by Wendy James!
About the Author:
Wendy James is the author of six books, including The Mustake (2012) and Out of the Silence, which won the 2006 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime Fiction and was shortlisted for the Nita May Dobbie Award for Women's Writing. She currently lives in Newcastle, New South Wales with her husband and two of their four children.
Reading Progress:
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