Hi! I’m back again to talk about another review copy I received through NetGalley. This time, we’re talking about All the Right Mistakes, a debut women’s fiction novel by Laura Jamison following the lives of five women before and after one of them decides to tell the others’ secrets to the world. As someone who primarily reads YA fiction, this book certainly took me out of my comfort zone. It’s a slow novel, focusing on the personal and professional issues each woman faces in their lives, and it was certainly an interesting read that I’m glad I gave a chance.
Five women, Heather, Elizabeth, Carmen, Martha, and Sara, once a tight-knit group in college are now all approaching forty, and have encountered different obstacles on their journeys through life. Elizabeth, an attorney, is about to get passed for a promotion at work, and has struggled to have another child after her first. Martha, a former doctor, is torn between staying home with her kids after her baby is born or going back into medicine. Sara, an attorney, grapples between having more time at home with her four kids or taking a hefty promotion that will provide them with the money they desparately need. And Carmen, the only stay-at-home mom of the bunch, is dealing with a husband who may not love her anymore and an inability to get pregnant. When Heather, COO of her company FLASH, comes out with a book equating each of her friends’ lives to four major mistakes younger women should avoid, the group must decide whether they’re going to follow Heather’s advice, or prove her wrong. **trigger warnings for miscarriage, death of a child, and death of a significant other**
It took me a while to get into this book, and that might’ve been all the different perspectives, the short chapters, and the way all the women are intertwined into each other’s storylines. I enjoyed that each of the women had a distinct personality, and each of their character choices felt like natural reactions to the situations they faced. This book was a nice character study into the lives of these older woman, which, like I stated above, is definitely a change from what I usually read. I wish there was a different perspective from a woman whose major focus wasn’t on having kids, because I believe that could’ve been an important conversation to have (that being said *minor spoiler* I did appreciate where Carmen’s storyline went in that regard). It felt it a bit jarring when they would all go back and forth on whether they should forgive Heather for writing the book in the first place, especially Elizabeth, who had always felt the closest to Heather, and Sara, who thought the book did make some good points, but I liked the conversation the book had about how you can forgive someone for doing something to you, but you can’t forgive them for doing something to someone else – that is not for you to decide, and that forgiveness is solely up to the person who has been hurt. The conversation also touched on how there really is no complete map to success to follow – each of us have our own obstacles we have to face and challenges to overcome, and just because we may not reach these “milestone moments” when society deems it appropriate, that does not mean we are in any way a failure.
The longer it’s been since I’ve finished this book, the more I want to make this point. Each of us has a story. We can choose to share it with our friends, our family, our loved ones, or keep parts of it to ourselves, but ultimately it is our decision, and ours alone. The book touched upon Heather, a character who has found greater success than her four friends in college, believing she has all the answers because she has watched them make mistakes and struggle while she has risen to fame. But those stories, those personal anecdotes Heather included in her self-help book, were not hers to share. She did not consider how her actions would affect her friends in their personal and professional lives, and even when she claimed she kept it “anonymous,” the sheer act of tagging them in a post “thanking them for inspiration” alerted her audience to make the obvious connections. Even if Heather had good intentions of preventing younger women from making these same mistakes, that did not make it justified. It is never your place to share those stories, because when you think you’re sharing a novel you may not have even read a single chapter. I appreciated that the book did not make excuses for Heather’s actions, and that she did, in the end, make the right decision to rectify her own past mistakes.
In the end, All the Right Mistakes was a quiet book about women who’ve made choices in the past that perhaps were not the greatest, but it led them to exactly where they needed to be. They came together and, for the most part, were there for each other in their darkest moments and worked to support and build each other up. I believe that many will be able to find something to relate to in one of these five women. All the Right Mistakes is being released on August 4th, 2020 (which is the day after this post goes live), and I’m excited to see what people think. *thank you NetGalley and She Writes Press for the e-copy, all thoughts and feelings are my own*
Places to find All the Right Mistakes:
Amazon
Goodreads
Laura Jamison’s site
She Writes Press
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Thoughts About Things 