 Hello everybody! E here. E here. Welcome back to another book review before we jump right into it. Happy Book Birthday to Imperfect Women by Aaron Minta Hall. That's what we're going to be reviewing today. This book, I was super, super excited to get my hands on this early. I decided to wait on this review because books tend to do better if people can go out and buy them right then and there. So, but I read this months, months ago. Aaron Minta contacted me and asked me if I'd like a review copy. And I freaked out. If you don't know our kind of cruelty, the year that it came out was one of my top five books of that year. It was a perfect, perfect response to books like Gone Girl by Jillian Flynn and You by Caroline Kepnes, perfect, almost like a triangle, like a full circle of, you know, it's the debate on, you know, the imperfect women, I guess it was. But the point that I'm trying to get to here is Aaron Minta does such a good job leading the reader to believe that her stories are about one type of thing. And then by the time you get to the end of it, it's something completely different. That's what our kind of cruelty did for me. This one did the same exact thing. If you're going into this expecting some kind of hard thriller, you might be disappointed. What I was coming to when I was thinking about how I was going to review this is it feels like a love child of a Herman Koch, K-O-C-H Koch. I'm not sure how you pronounce the last name. One of his novels and it blended with a Lisa Jewel novel. So basically what I'm getting at is come for the characters. She does character so well she's one of my favorite character writers. There are three different women in this book. The book takes place kind of in the present in the past and then back to the present. Excuse me. There is Eleanor, Nancy and Mary. All three of these women are so diverse. Completely different characters with their own issues, their own problems. And I love a diverse cast of characters in that they're not all the same cardboard cutouts. The men in this book are very well drawn also the way they react. Some of the situations that they get themselves into. But the point of the book, I mean it's called Imperfect Women. It's about these three women and how they're struggling. It opens up with the death of a friend. And the rest of the book tells how you get, how they got to that point. And then there's a twist at the end that I had absolutely no idea was coming. But again if you're looking for a straight thriller, probably look elsewhere. I guess you would call this one a domestic thriller. It's all about just the everyday lives of three normal women. There's no detectives, there's no, well there is a crime. But there's nothing like, you know, not hard boiled. There's nothing, you know, I don't think there's too much thrillery about it. It is one of those books that kind of defies genre placement and I love books like that. So it certainly isn't a knock. Because I'm not a huge fan of thrillers. This one, going back to the Lisa Jewel and Herman Koch comparison. The way she blends how each character's, it's almost like the butterfly effect. How each and every character's a small mishap. Some of them are big, don't get me wrong. How they led to the next one. Until finally you get to the end and you're like, wow, okay, so this is much, much deeper. That's another thing that I appreciated about it is the book has some very deep stuff in it. I have some quotes here. Let me find, I need to start using those little tabs. Oh, let's see here. Eleanor thought of all the people she'd seen desolated by loss over the years. Places where the earth had moved from under them or seas had risen up and devoured them. Women and men who had lost everything and everyone. She realized she'd always been rather sniffy about western grief as she thought of it. Sorry, I'm bad at reading. But anyways, she realized she'd always been rather sniffy about western grief as she thought of it. How she'd read stories about a murder or a teenager dying of an overdose and wonder at the extent of the reaction, wanting to take the writers of these articles to the places she knew where you could legitimately use the word devastation. But she hadn't known what it was like to inhabit moments like this. How no words seemed enough. How it really did feel like the end of the world. I read this, I started this shortly after my mom passed away in February. And this book hit me hard, especially the very first part. It hit me very hard as far as this one woman dealing with the loss of this other person. I don't guess it's a spoiler telling you who it is, but I kind of want to keep it out just so those of you that don't read the description won't be spoiled. There is so much in this book, so there's so many deep sections that I fell in love with it. It is a very, very easy five stars. It's one of those books that as soon as I put it down I wanted to read it all over again for several reasons. I wanted to experience it again. Another thing is I wanted to find all the breadcrumbs that Hall had left throughout the book. The book is out today, August 4th. Please go out and buy it. Please give it your time. Please leave a review. Please support this author because she's doing fantastic, fantastic work, especially with her characters. And if you're a thriller fan you don't see too much of that. Maybe you do more in the domestic side of things, but I don't. I'm usually like, okay, I've read about this person a hundred times before, whereas with this one, these were not new characters to me, but their struggles were new. They felt I was interested. I guess it's the best way to put it. I was intrigued, I was engaged, and that's all you can really ask for in a good book. So have you read Imperfect Women? Did you get your hands on the ARC? If you did, congratulations. Let me know if you loved it, if you hated it. All that stuff down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have been E. You have been U. This has been another book review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!