Afterwards

Author: Rosamund Lupton
Goodreads Rating: 3.86
My Rating: 4.5 Stars
Pages: 400
Reviewed by: Nicole


I saw this book as a giveaway on Goodreads, which I didn't win but I liked it enough to add it to my "to read" shelf. When I saw I could request it on Netgalley, I jumped at the chance and was thrilled when I was approved to read it. 


Goodreads Synopses:


There is a fire and they are in there. They are in there...

Black smoke stains a summer blue sky. A school is on fire. And one mother, Grace, sees the smoke and rush. She knows her teenage daughter Jenny is inside. She runs into the burning building to rescue her.

Afterwards Grace must find the identity of the arsonist and protect her children from the person who's still intent on destroying them. Afterwards, she must fight the limits of her physical strength and discover the limitlessness of love.
The end of this book left me feeling at peace if you can believe it. The entire time that I read this book, there was always a chance that things would work out with a happy ending or that there would be a happy ending. Maybe I'm just an optimist, but I always hold onto the hope that there will be a happy ending. 


I wasn't expecting the book to go the way that it did, but then again, after I started it and I had that thought, I wondered what I was expecting, and then I realized that I had no idea what I was expecting but what the book was, I didn't expect. I still really enjoyed this book. What I didn't realize was that the book was about Grace and her daughter Jenny stuck in the in-between.


After being badly injured the in fire, Grace and Jenny try to come to peace with what happened while also trying to figure out how this happened. I loved that Grace's sister in law, a police detective, tried her hardest to solve the mystery of who set this fire. I loved that even though they didn't see eye to eye, she still fought her hardest to protect Grace and her family when she couldn't. 


This book lead you down so many different paths of who did it and why that you don't even know until the very end why it happened which I thought was so messed up but at the same time I thought it was brilliant. A lot of people seemed disappointed in this book (at least the top reviewed on goodreads). I felt very at peace with the ending of the book which was surprising to me. I totally loved it and how it discussed the mother/daughter relationship.