About the Book
What if the one thing that kept you together was breaking you apart?
All Linda wants to do is sleep. She won’t look at her husband. She can’t stand her daughter. And she doesn’t want to have this baby. Having this baby means moving on, and she just wants to go back to before. Before their family was torn apart, before the blame was placed.
Alienated by their own guilt and struggling to cope, the Sadler family unravels. They grow up, grow apart, never talking about their terrible secret.
That is until Linda’s daughter finds out she’s pregnant. Before she brings another Sadler into the world, Bea needs to know what happened twenty-five years ago. What did they keep from her? What happened that couldn’t be fixed?
A devastating mistake, a lifetime of consequences. How can you repair something broken if pieces are missing?
My Review
Missing Pieces is a book told in two parts. In part one, we watch a family destroyed by grief after losing a young daughter. We are never quite privy to the details around the death of Phoebe, but we see how the mother, father, and also young sister deal with the aftermath of losing a loved one. There are some truly heartbreaking moments during this part of the story, especially with Linda, the mother, and her overwhelming sadness.
In part two, we follow Bea, who was born months after the death of Phoebe. Bea is now pregnant, but becomes determined to find out what happened to her family when she was just a baby. What happened to the sister no one talks about, what happened to her mother? She starts to bond once again with sister and father, as she navigates a pregnancy that wasn’t expected.
While I did enjoy Missing Pieces and stayed interested in the story throughout, I didn’t get as emotionally invested as I thought I would. Instead of being in the story, I felt like I was simply watching from the sidelines, not quite able to get in the game. It was still a very well written novel and one that made you think how you would handle certain situations that the Sadler family deals with. This is Laura Pearson’s debut novel, and I would definitely read more from her.
4 stars
