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It All Comes Down to This

A Novel

Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available

Therese Anne Fowler's It All Comes Down to This is a warm, keenly perceptive novel of sisterhood, heartbreak, home, and what it takes to remake a life at its halfway point, for fans of Ann Patchett and Emma Straub.
Meet the Geller sisters: Beck, Claire, and Sophie, a trio of strong-minded women whose pragmatic, widowed mother, Marti, will be dying soon and taking her secrets with her. Marti has ensured that her modest estate is easy for her family to deal with once she's gone––including a provision that the family's summer cottage on Mount Desert Island, Maine, must be sold, the proceeds split equally between the three girls.
Beck, the eldest, is a freelance journalist whose marriage looks more like a sibling bond than a passionate partnership. In fact, her husband Paul is hiding a troubling truth about his love life. For Beck, the Maine cottage has been essential to her secret wish to write a novel––and to remake the terms of her relationship.
Despite her accomplishments as a pediatric cardiologist, Claire, the middle daughter, has always felt like the Geller misfit. Recently divorced, Claire's secret unrequited love for the wrong man is slowly destroying her, and she's finding that her expertise on matters of the heart unfortunately doesn't extend to her own.
Youngest daughter Sophie appears to live an Instagram-ready life, filled with glamorous work and travel, celebrities, fashion, art, and sex. In reality, her existence is a cash-strapped house of cards that may crash at any moment.
Enter C.J. Reynolds, an enigmatic southerner ex-con with his own hidden past, who complicates the situation. All is not what it seems, and everything is about to change.
A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 25, 2022
      Fowler (The Good Neighborhood) returns with a smooth Austenesque tale of midlife reckoning. Matriarch Marti Geller, faced with terminal cancer, worries about her daughters. “That is what wills are for,” Fowler writes, “to pull the strings you weren’t able to... in life.” The oldest, Beck, a freelance writer, is stuck in a sexless marriage. Claire, a cardiologist, is recently divorced and pining for a man she shouldn’t be. Sophie, an art curator, is Instagram famous, but drowning in debt. Upon Marti’s death, the girls are left with instructions to gather one last time at the family summer home off the coast of Maine before selling it and splitting the proceeds. In chapters from alternating points of view, Fowler skillfully captures each woman’s contemporary narrative and backstory without losing the thread of time and place even as the book hopscotches through flashbacks and locales ranging from Mount Desert Island to Duluth and Dubai. At times she relies on too convenient coincidences to move the plot and the random insertions of an omniscient narrator to explain things, but the well-developed character studies keep the reader chugging along until the satisfying conclusion. Neither too complex nor too light, this goes down as easily as an Aperol spritz.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Barrie Kreinik enlivens a rather flat, predictable story about three sisters whose lives are turned upside down by the death of their mother. Listeners spend hours learning about the women's material and sexual desires, their career and marital insecurities, their paltry anxieties, and, of course, their relationships with each other. There are some memorable portrayals in this lengthy production. The soft, gentle voice of the masseuse in Duluth; the raspy timbre and Down East accent of grande dame Deirdre, who lives on Mount Desert Island, Maine; and the South Carolina drawl of ex-con and heartthrob C.J. Reynolds invigorate this production. Some listeners will feel they are enjoying a heartwarming family drama. Others may find the characters lackluster despite a more than competent rendering. D.L.G. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

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