The Year That Follows

I was up until 1 am last night finishing The Year That Follows by Scott Lasser. Was it really that good to keep me up so late? No. We were out until midnight, so I was just doing my usual bedtime reading and wanted to finish it so that I could get to another book!

The book had an interesting premise: a woman trying to find her dead brother's baby.

Divorced, Cat Miller went to visit her 40 year old brother Kyle in New York and at dinner he told her that his ex-girlfriend had just had a baby and he thought that he was probably the father. The next morning, Kyle headed to a meeting in the World Trade Center. It was September 11, 2001. Cat looked/waited for Kyle briefly, then realized that she just wanted to head home to her young son, Connor. She finally was able to get a rental car and headed home to Detroit.

Over the next year, Cat searched for Kyle's ex-girlfriend, wanting to know if her brother had left a child. She searched the NY paper every day, and finally after a year, there it was....the girlfriend had also died on 9/11.

Meanwhile, Cat's father, Sam is living on the West Coast, 80 years old and not in good health. He has kept a secret from Cat all of her life and is feeling the need to tell her. He asks her to come out to CA to visit, not telling her that he is not well. Cat has not told Sam about Kyle's child.

I won't divulge the rest of the story, but I guess that the 2 secrets somehow play into each other. I never cared enough about the characters to really sit and analyze the story. Maybe I am not giving the book enough credit, but I just wasn't really taken with it. Not great writing. Not bad writing. I cared enough to finish the book to see how it ended, but didn't care enough to spend time thinking about it! Which, after having lost 2 brothers in the past 20 years, is rather sad that the book didn't touch something in me. And believe me, it isn't hard to reach that pain, so I think that tells something about the book.

I would give it a "pass over".