View source for Skeletons by Jane Fallon

{{infobox1
|title=Skeletons
|author=Jane Fallon
|reviewer=Zoe Morris
|genre=Women's Fiction
|rating=4.5
|buy=Yes
|borrow=Yes
|isbn=978-0141047263
|pages=448
|publisher=Penguin
|date=March 2014
|summary=Nosy as we are, sometimes knowing is infinitely worse than not knowing...as Jen now knows. Fun, easy to read chick lit.
|cover=0141047267
|aznuk=0141047267
|aznus=0141047267
}}
Jen doesn’t have the happiest of families, so she’s immediately drawn to her husband Jason’s. Luckily they welcome her with open arms and she’s soon like a fourth child to Charles and Amelia. So when she discovers a secret that could tear lives apart, it’s as devastating to her as if it were her own parents. She has a choice to make: share the burden and ruin relationships in the process, or keep it to herself and shoulder it all alone.

I liked [[:Category:Jane Fallon|Jane Fallon's]] earlier books and this one is of a similar style with lots of attention to detail and intricate subplots that have an impact on the overall ending. Jen works in a hotel which could have given rise to any number of kooky characters checking in and out, but in the end it’s only one, Sean, who stands out. Similarly, Charles is a well-known face and so celeb anecdotes could have peppered the pages, but that’s not what the story here is about, and so they are absent but not in a conspicuous way.  

In some books a character grows and develops as the pages turn, and that seemed to be the case here. Then Jen from the start and the Jen from the end could be two different women, either because she wasn’t being true to herself initially or, as I think is more likely, because the events of the story change her. Whether or not it is a nice change is up for debate, but it’s an understandable one and whatever your feelings towards her, you have to have a little sympathy for the way the wrong doing of someone else in her extended family ultimately has such an impact on her immediate family, with Jason and their daughters.

This book is easy to read, fluidly written and full of nostalgic moments. It is Cass’s story as well as Jen’s, but the fact I’ve waited until now to mention her name perhaps demonstrates the way the story goes and whose point of view comes across more. It’s interesting to find a story that has a mother as the lead but whose children are such minor players in it, though that is the case here and I would struggle to name the girls without a quick flick back through the pages. In the end, though, this is a tale of adult relationships, grown-ups as equals, and how family can become strangers in the blink of an eye.

Thanks go to the publishers for supplying this book.

[[Mother of the Year by Karen Ross]] will also appeal if you like the sound of this. Charles and Beth are two celeb parents and that's not their only thing in common.

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