I'm going to admit that I wasn't fully prepared for what this book is, but I'm also not ashamed to say that if the parts I didn't know were mentioned in the blurb, I would have passed this book right on by and missed a helluva good story.
So, synopsis: Mariah is a former Olympic skier who suffered a traumatic, career-ending injury that she is still recovering from a year and a half later. When she discovers plans for her late mother's unfinished book project, Mariah decides to retrace her steps and finish the project. Knowing that she needs help physically as well as with the research aspects of the project, Mariah ends up hiring Veronica, a recently divorced woman who's trying to figure out what's next. They're joined on their journey by Henry, a former war photographer who was a close friend of Mariah's mother. Together the trio travels to London, Paris, Marrakech, Mumbai, and Delhi, following clues found in a series of letters Mariah's mother wrote to her sister during her time studying in India.
Told in third person limited, the story alternates points of view between Mariah and Veronica. Although everything kind of revolves around Mariah, which makes sense considering its her project, she didn't feel like the main character to me. Veronica felt like the focus of the narrative, even from Mariah's perspective. Though it would be unfair to compare them, both women are healing from their pasts, and each needs the other in order to move forward.
As for Henry, I fell a little bit in love with him, I'm not gonna lie. I feel like every Barbara O'Neal book I read has one male character that just resonates. Henry, for his part, is both a love interest and father figure. I also love that he's a photojournalist.
This book is not terribly long. It's 381 pages, fifty-nine chapters total. It took me a few days to read it. The story is told in a linear timeline, but there are old letters from Mariah's mother interspersed throughout to help guide the characters on their journey. Both Mariah and Veronica have flashbacks, but those are relegated to scenes, usually through dialogue, versus full chapters.
***Spoilers***
The story begins with a prologue told from Veronica's point of view that helps to establish her backstory, so we'll start there.
Eighteen months ago, Veronica is going through a divorce. Her husband of nearly thirty years, Spence, got a visiting professor pregnant and wants to start a new family with her. Since their home is actually Spence's family's home, Veronica has to move out and can't find an apartment that will allow her to keep her dog, Sophie. So the dog is living with Spence and his new wife, Fiona, and Veronica has specific times that she is allowed to come to the house to do things with her dog -- if you couldn't guess, those times are when the new wife isn't there.
The dog gets sick and has to take medicine. Veronica goes over every afternoon to handle that, but when she has to work two days in a row and misses her time slot, Spence and Fiona fail to give the dog its medicine, and she dies. Veronica, having lost everything else she cares for, loses her mind a little bit. She takes a brick from the garden that she cultivated over the course of her marriage and begins breaking the windows on the house. She's arrested and charged with domestic violence and ends up having to take anger management courses.
Mariah, meanwhile, is experiencing a darker trauma. She and her mother, Rachel, are at a grocery store in Denver when a gunman comes in and goes on a shooting spree. Rachel is killed instantly; Mariah is shot several times and almost dies. One of the bullets shattered the bone in her leg and nicked the femoral artery. Miraculously, surgeons are able to save her leg, though she'll never ski competitively again, if at all.
Now, in the present day, Mariah is still recovering physically and hasn't processed her grief or trauma over the shooting and suffers from PTSD. When she discovers notes for an unfinished book her mother was working on about Parsi cafes, Mariah's aunt, Jill, encourages her to finish the project. Jill plans to go along with Mariah as a sort of companion, but then her husband suffers a medical emergency that requires her presence. Not wanting to cancel the trip, Mariah starts looking for a travel companion.
Veronica, meanwhile, is struggling to make ends meet. Her monthly alimony check just isn't enough, and her ex is trying to get her to agree to an even lower amount. Worse, he's still coming around for sex, and Veronica never refuses his advances. In fact, she rarely if ever tells him or any of their three children no. When her children inform her that they will not be seeing her for Christmas, Veronica knows something needs to change. Then she comes across Mariah's job posting, applies, interviews, and accepts the position.
First stop -- London, where they meet up with Henry. There are definite sparks between him and Veronica, but they don't act on it at first, which is good since Mariah feels pretty weirded out by any hint of impropriety between the two of them since Henry dated her mom at one point, and Mariah regards him like a father figure.
Mariah, meanwhile, is struggling. She's taking too many pain pills, drinking too much, and not eating like she should. Henry, in true fatherly fashion, manages to convince her to take better care of herself so that their journey will be successful.
Basically, they eat their way through three countries using Rachel's notes as a guide. However, the first cafe the visit in London is a bust. The owner actually kicks them out because she recognizes Mariah as Rachel's daughter. Confused and completely in the dark, they reach out to Jill who agrees to share letters Rachel wrote to her from the time she spent as a student in India, which is where Rachel's love of Parsi cafes began.
As they travel from country to country visiting the cafes on Rachel's list, they learn more about the past she never shared with Mariah. While studying in India, Rachel became involved with the Irani family, who owned a popular Parsi cafe in Mumbai. Something happened, though, that ended the friendship with Rachel and caused the family to leave India, scattering to three different counties. However, none of Rachel's letters that Jill shared explains what led to the break.
You've probably figured it out by now, but the journey Rachel had planned for the book was one of redemption, and now Mariah wants to see it through. With Veronica doing the research and now officially under contract to ghostwrite Rachel's last book posthumously, Mariah, Veronica, and Henry begin to unravel the secrets surrounding Rachel's past.
The further they travel, though, the more apparent it becomes that Mariah's PTSD is getting worse. She has several episodes that threaten to end the whole adventure, including one where she thinks she sees her mother in a mall, but she manages to convince Henry and Veronica to see it through to the end.
Veronica manages to convince Jill to send Rachel's final letter from India which details what happened. However, Jill doesn't want Mariah to read the letter due to her current mental state. The letter reveals what happened between Rachel and the Irani family, which Veronica learns in person after a harrowing solo journey through Delhi to a bookstore owned by one of the Irani sisters.
Rachel became romantically involved with the elder brother, Darshan, but ended things when she realized what being together would mean for Darshan long-term. Darshan did not take the break-up well and took his own life, which cast a shadow over his family. They closed their cafe and then split off to different countries where they opened new cafes and one sister a bookstore.
Soon after, the trio return to Denver where Veronica doesn't have an apartment to return to. While they were traveling, her ex-husband canceled her alimony payment, which meant Veronica could not pay her rent for the month. She tried to get her daughter to help out, but she couldn't be bothered, and her sons were no help either. She reached out to a friend she made through anger management classes to see if she would be interested in becoming roommates, but the landlord took one look at her friend's ankle bracelet and shut the entire deal down. The landlord also discovered Veronica's domestic violence arrest info and evicted her.
Thankfully, over the course of the trip, Veronica and Mariah become close. Mariah, who very obviously still needs help, offers Veronica a place to stay for a few months while she sorts everything out. Henry, being the chivalrous guy he is, makes arrangements to get all of Veronica's things from her apartment while they're still overseas.
The book ends with a flash forward to six months later. Veronica has moved out of Mariah's house into her own place. She and Henry are officially seeing each other, and she and Mariah are like pseudo-family. They're all gathered at Veronica's new apartment to celebrate Mariah's birthday and to introduce both her and Henry to Veronica's kids.
Veronica is writing Rachel's last book. She also has a job working at a greenhouse. She's trying to mend her relationship with her kids and has, thankfully, cut all ties with her ex-husband, who I must say got his comeuppance. Henry is still working as photographer, and Mariah has finally gotten the help she needs. All in all, a very happy and realistic ending.
***End Spoilers***
This book was just so good. Just like in When We Were Mermaids and This Place of Wonder, Barbara O'Neal tackles a serious story in such a beautiful way. And she does it all around the table. Food and restaurants seem to be her thing, at least in these three books. Her character development is so on point and so relatable.
This is definitely not a book to speed read your way through. The characters are so deeply complicated and their healing process is not linear. At times, Mariah was very unlikeable -- she's blunt and curt and can be quite rude. You don't know the extent of her trauma until you're about a third of the way through the book. Once you know that, you begin to understand her more, though her obsession with psychics is still a bit odd to me.
Veronica is so dynamic. She evolves so much throughout the book. At the beginning, she's such a pushover and so non-assertive. I'm not going to lie; all of Veronica's interactions with her children and her ex-husband made me angry on her behalf. It was such a pleasure watching her take her life back and remind her family that she's a person, too.
I said at the start of the post that I fell a little bit in love with Henry, and it's because of the way he treats Veronica. When they first admit their attraction to each other but their moment gets interrupted, he calls her so they can dance to Veronica's favorite Leonard Cohen song over the phone (this is the song they dance to if you're interested). There are so many moments like that, and I love how he just lets her be herself with no expectations that she change to fit into some preconceived mold.
So, final thoughts and recommendations. Read this book! Then read everything else you can get your hands on by this author. You won't regret it.
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