Nine Perfect Strangers

I needed a big, fat juicy summer read. I've been reading about Abe Lincoln and family violence and other not-so-pleasant topics. I needed to sink my guilty teeth into something more pleasurable - and, I found it in a pretty obvious place.

I haven't read any of Liane Moriarty's books, but I'm deep into Big Little Lies on HBO (in fact, I'm sitting here trying to watch it, but HBO Now is down... first world problems). I just had a feeling this book was too "easy" and derivative and I was kind of being snobby about it. I thought I had it all mapped out (you know, book going one way, shocking twist at the most predictable point.) But, it was at the library on the 14-day loan shelf and it's summer, so I dove in.

You know what? It was fantastic for exactly the reasons I wasn't going to read it in the first place.

In the book, a group of strangers all end up at a fancy health resort. They're from all walks of life, totally different in a Breakfast Club kind of way. Like said breakfast club, they've come for different reasons, or so it appears, and they hand their lives over to an enigmatic leader named Masha. She promises that they will be different people when they leave. She promises the transforming experience they came for. She starts by forcing five days of silence, hands over the mandated smoothies and get down to business.

They quickly realize they're basically trapped. And that's not the least of their problems.

Sounds like a good old beach read, right?

And, it totally is.

But, there's some deeper elements, too. You realize that while all the strangers are there for different reasons, they're all really there to help get back a piece of themselves that they lost. How they'll end up finding it here is really up to interpretation. But, for whatever reason, this 400+ page book flew by,

Sometimes, you just need to stop overthinking it. Sometimes it's okay to grab the beach read.