Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

Title: Apples Never Fall

Author: Liane Moriarty

Release Date: September 14, 2021

Length: 467 pages

Genre: General Fiction / Mystery

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***My Review***

This amazing Australian novelist has written another fantastic book. She has a great talent for probing interpersonal dynamics and revealing the hidden agendas of friends and family interactions. While doing so, she crafts a compelling narrative that keeps readers turning pages to find out what happens next.

Joy Delaney has vanished in unsolved circumstances. She has left her four adult children with a mysterious note. Stan, her spouse, is also acting extremely strangely. The four kids are reluctant to call the police for fear that their father would be implicated. Why is it the first thing the family worries about? What does that say about the family?

Despite the fact that the tale alternates between the past and the present and has several points of view from Delaney’s family members, we are able to see how the mother’s abrupt, unexpected absence is connected to the family’s actions. We learn more about the reasons behind their decisions and regrets. How the past’s secrets influenced their future. The trajectory of Joy Delaney’s abrupt disappearance and the incident last fall when a little girl called Savannah unexpectedly showed up at their parents’ front door were brilliantly depicted by the author.

What links these two situations together most strongly? How do children deal with their mothers had vanished?

I felt Apples Never Fall to be a compelling home drama with a good amount of mystery around each character’s motivations and innermost thoughts. I also enjoyed how this novel jumps back and forth in time, with each character delivering a chapter.

Despite not always being very pleasant, I thought that each of the main characters was well-developed, and I could relate to the idea that various family members sometimes recall the same events differently and that childhood wounds frequently have lasting effects.

To emphasize the familial bonds and events, the tale is effectively told over two timeframes. One is the present when Joy is reported missing, and the police believe that her husband Stan may be connected to her disappearance.

The second story, which is told in flashbacks from each of the Delaney siblings, is about the day a strange young woman called Savannah knocked on Stan and Joy’s door the previous year. The Delaneys were glad to extend Savannah the tiny favor she urgently needed.

They both had moments when they were a touch sluggish. Although I felt like skipping pages, I also didn’t want to miss anything.

Furthermore, I’ve always appreciated Moriarty’s ability to make incisive observations on people and their foibles in her works. She possesses the talent to reveal both the ugly and the beautiful aspects of human nature while adding just the appropriate amount of humor as she peels back the layers of family dynamics and what it means to be human.

This novel touches on sensitive issues that are universally known, yet they are expertly depicted and incorporated into the narrative.

Readers may see the effects of decades of piled-up mistakes and failures via intricate relationships, imperfect characters, secrets, sibling rivalry, and, most importantly, regrets. We learn from what might have happened and what is that each choice they made had an impact on their lives.

It was a bit of a shock when this book ended since I had no idea what was going to happen, but it also seemed like the ideal way to wrap up everything that had transpired.

Apples Never Fall is a superb family drama/mystery that explores family relationships with unflinching honesty and a healthy dose of humor. A great option for anyone looking for a book with constant family turmoil. Each chapter reveals a fresh family secret or narrative since there are so many different members.