Synopsis from Goodreads.com:
When Grace, an exceedingly competent and devoted therapist in Montreal, stumbles across a man who has just failed to hang himself, her instinct to help kicks in immediately. Before long, however, she realizes that her feelings for this charismatic, extremely guarded stranger are far from straightforward. In the meantime, her troubled teenage patient, Annie, runs away from home and soon will reinvent herself in New York as an aspiring and ruthless actress, as unencumbered as humanly possible by any personal attachments.
And Mitch, Grace’s ex-husband, who is a therapist as well, leaves the woman he’s desperately in love with to attend to a struggling native community in the bleak Arctic. We follow these four compelling, complex characters from Montreal and New York to Hollywood and Rwanda, each of them with a consciousness that is utterly distinct and urgently convincing.
With razor-sharp emotional intelligence, Inside poignantly explores the many dangers as well as the imperative of making ourselves available to—and responsible for—those dearest to us.
My review:
I wasn’t completely sure what to expect out of this book, considering it wasn’t the usual happy & fluffy genre of chick-lit I usually steer towards, but I decided to go for it anyway. While I didn’t LOVE love the book, I did enjoy it.
Each character has their own storyline, all while being intertwined at the same time. I think I enjoyed following Grace’s story the most, mostly because of the relationship she develops with the man she found while out skiing. If there were a main character of the book, I suppose it would be Grace as she has the most interaction with all of the other characters.
**SPOILER ALERT!**
The book drew me in by pulling on my psychological heart strings; every page turn made me want to figure out each character a little more, and this leads to the reason why I didn’t enjoy Inside as much as I had hoped I would, because I really wanted to know MORE. I found that there were a lot of loose ends in the character’s stories – Why Grace closed her practice (To give a better life for her daughter? Because it was pulled by the board after Annie’s incident?), why Annie chose to run away, why Mitch and Grace split up to begin with … I suppose this is a reflection of the underlying theme of the book. A need to know more about a person’s life is something that therapists and psychologists are always battling with, so it makes sense why the author chose to write this way.
Overall, I’d give Inside 3.5 stars out of 5. I really wanted more out of the characters, but the style of the book wasn’t allowing that.
