This was my first read of Jane Green's titles. I'll be picking up other ones I think. I really like her style and her ability to tell a story.
This is an intriguing story. Green weaves the tale of two families that share one husband and father and the only one who knows it is him. Maggie, wife number 1, and Sylvie, wife number 2, couldn't be more different from how they raise children to how they decorate a home. And Mark relates to each family very differently, throughout the years he becomes a masterful con man and liar. You get the sense that he justified it and thought he would be able to get away with it forever. But as we all know, nothing like that kind of deception can stay a secret forever and a series of "random" events lead to exposure of Mark's double life. As you can imagine the feelings of anger, betrayal, sadness, shock, and devastation run deep and everyone responds differently. This is the story of Mark's two wives, children, and lives both before the exposure and after and how they all found their way to healing.
Gosh this story was SO interesting. You know this is happening somewhere in America - with more than one family. Some of them are not secret (TLC's Sister Wives is one example of a not so secret bigamist) and others are steeped in deception like this particular story was. Green did a masterful job of almost making even the reader believe it might not be true! It was well-written and the character development was pretty good. I wish that Green had written some chapters from Mark's POV, it would have been interesting to have his voice in the midst of the wives and children. That would have helped, in my opinion, the reader get a sense of what Mark may have been thinking. Because the entire way through the book I was thinking, "Dude, what in the hell are you thinking?!" Just sayin'. :)