REVIEW: YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, BY JEAN HANFF KORELITZ

 

Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things: she lives in the very New York apartment in which she was raised, and sends Henry to the school she herself once attended.

Dismayed by the ways in which women delude themselves, Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them. But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself.

 

 

 

 

From the first few moments of You Should Have Known, I was caught up in Grace’s life as a therapist, a writer, and a diligent wife and mother. But then, unexpectedly, her life began to unravel. Perhaps the words she wrote in her book were even more true than she had realized: Perhaps she, too, should have known.

When the police begin hounding her and the other mothers at the tony private school shun her, she has a taste of what her new life will look like.

A glimpse back at the choices she had made and the relationship she had believed in revealed more than she could have imagined.

As she is forced to move beyond the life she had taken for granted, however, she begins to discover her true self. A rustic life in Connecticut has morphed into something she can savor. New friends, old friends rediscovered, and the unexpected resurrection of her therapy practice give her strength to start over.

This was a book I had begun reading years ago and now have found to be enjoyable. 4.5 stars.

 

***