The Cove: LJ Ross

(mild spoiler alerts, although I’ve tried not to)

This falls into a beach read that is a bit of a thriller.  The protagonist has something happen to them at the beginning of the story which shapes who they are as a person.  Their reaction to this event goes on to predict their behaviour through the book.

The author seemed to want to touch on anxiety, depression, OCD, betrayal by a fiancé and a best friend all in one character.  The level of trauma in the lead's life does mean that there is something for everyone to identify or empathise with, but it also means that each blow is dealt with fairly superficially.  I like her though, I like that even though she couldn’t tell her fiancé was a complete abusive arsehole through his normal behaviour, it made her just like how the rest of us are some of the time.  Those relationships where you wonder what you are doing wrong and try to work harder rather than recognise his petulant child behaviour for what it is.  However she did have a hard line on cheating and got rid of him that way and that validated my emotions.

There is the obligatory moving away to get past the heartbreak but the author did find an interesting location for this and still managed to plant the potential new love without needing to shoe horn him in or make where he lived an issue.  The new romance was handled really quite well, his secrets coming out slowly as part of the story.  All of the characters are a little 2 dimensional but it just serves to keep this as  a light read rather than a story I really got invested in.  

Overall I liked that the author wanted characters who had some individuality, it was interesting that she decided to try to achieve this by giving the protagonist psychiatric disorders that developed from an incident in her life and compared this to the love interest who had a traumatic episode but didn’t become unwell from it.

I think because I listened to this in the car on the way to work so I broke up a boring commute it was a good way to utilise the book, I relaxed rather than tensed on the way to work which is why it might also work as  a holiday wind down read.  

This is a book I would buy for a work colleague I didn’t know very well/secret santa.