Her Perfect Life is a domestic psychological thriller following two women - Juliet and Gracie. Juliet is a down on her luck single mom struggling to make ends meet and keep going for her daughter. Gracie, on the outside, has the perfect life. She has a successful career as a celebrity chef, a loving family with her husband and daughter, and a beautiful new house. However, behind closed doors her life isn't so perfect. Juliet and Gracie meet while watching their daughter's dance class and find themselves becoming friends. As their relationship develops, they start opening up and sharing their backgrounds and personal troubles and the two discover just how closely their lives are intertwined.
I really enjoyed the characters of both Juliet and Gracie. I found them both to be dynamic, interesting, and complicated characters which made me want to root for both of them. The book is told through alternating POV chapters between these two and initially I had a hard time because both of them sounded so similar. Their circumstances and plots were very different, but their voice through the first 25% of the book was so similar that it felt like I was just reading about a single character. However, once they started interacting with each other, I found their voices to be much more distinct. Them meeting is also a catalyst for some of their personal insecurities to start showing up which I think was integral to developing them more as distinct characters. With Juliet and Gracie being so different, I think it would be easy to have one character be obviously worse than the other, but I think there's a really good balance presented. We get the good and bad of each of them, from both their own and the other perspective. I didn't find the other side characters as well developed and there were so many of them that I honestly would get them confused if they were just mentioned by name. I am very bad with names in real life and all the characters did have a purpose for being in the story - I don't think any of them could have been cut - so this might have just been a personal issue.
The relationships between all the characters were really interesting as well. Gracie with her husband, Juliet with her ex, Gracie and her best friend, and of course Gracie and Juliet. Each had a different dynamic and I thought it was really interesting to see how the characters changed depending on the situation. Juliet is emotional, hot headed, and scared of her ex but with Gracie she is vulnerable and in need of a friend. Gracie with her best friend is confident and carefree but with her husband she is a bit paranoid and standoffish. There are more side characters such as the in-laws and the nanny as well that are all intertwined. Again, these relationships and the way they're developed throughout the story do a fantastic job at creating well rounded characters.
The plot got off to a bit of a slow start. We find out a big conflict right in the beginning but it gets pretty much brushed aside almost immediately and the rest of the set up (about 25%) is mostly domestic stuff like picking up kids from school, finding a new house, going on job interviews, etc. The plot and tension really pick up once Juliet and Gracie meet but getting through that first chunk was a bit of a slog. Looking back, I think the beginning served for a good set up showing how different these two women are but I would have liked the plot to get moving a little more quickly. The rest of the plot moved along at a good pace that really kept me engaged once I got past that slow beginning portion.
Of course, this is a thriller, and all thriller readers want a good twist. I thought the twist was built up really well through Juliet's investigation and trying to find what Gracie was hiding. I found Juliet's investigation to be really methodical and well laid out, but I found it mostly information gathering and then she puts it all together at the end without too much speculation or red herrings in the middle of the book. I could see part of the twist coming, but was wrong about which characters were actually involved. I don't mind being wrong about twists in thrillers (I actually prefer to be) but when I reflected on the plot of the book, I couldn't really see any threads that would lead to the ending. To be fair, the other characters were just as surprised so the twist character did a good job of hiding what they had done but the fact that I couldn't go back and pick up on little things made the reveal feel a little 'gotcha'-y. It wasn't bad enough to affect my overall enjoyment or rating, but it is something I could see some readers disliking. It also could be that I just didn't pick up on smaller details so maybe this is just another personal issue.
What did bother me was the ending, literally the very last page of the book, where a plot point that I assumed was resolved with the big twist ends up still being a problem. Granted, maybe I was wrong to make such an assumption but I really think the plot and structure of the book was pushing the reader toward that thought of X being resolved because Y was resolved. However, this turns out not to be the case and one of the big conflicts of the story comes back right at the end and we are left with a cliffhanger. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I don't mind ambiguous endings or endings where not everything is tied up in a neat little bow. If the book ended with the character wondering if X was still going to be a problem down the line, then that would have been perfectly fine. But this sort of ending where we get smacked over the head as if the book is saying "look! look! X is still a problem!" is too heavy handed for me especially when this isn't being marketed as any sort of series. Will we ever find out what the resolution to this plot thread is? Probably not, and that would not bother me if the ending wasn't so flashy with the reveal.
I really enjoyed Hepburn's writing style particularly when it came to the inner thoughts of these characters. I find it really fun to be able to look back at the beginning of the story and see, in the structure of the prose, how the characters are changing. I think this difference was particularly striking in Juliet's chapters where, by the end, we're getting these long rambling paragraphs as she is trying to connect all the dots of her investigation. The writing really focused on the characters more so than the surroundings but I still had a good picture in my head of the different settings we get throughout the book. I prefer a writing style that isn't super flowery while still being interesting and dynamic and I think Hepburn did a good job straddling that line for me.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book - bit of a slow start but once it gets going, it chugs along steadily and picks up speed right at the end. I loved the writing style, characters, and relationships that Hepburn created. Really solid domestic psychological thriller.
392 pages
First published February 23, 2017 by Harper
New release date: February 15, 2021 by Bookouture
Thanks to NetGalley and Bookouture for the ARC.
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