Title: I’d Give Anything

Author: Marisa de los Santos

Publisher: William Morrow 2020

Genre: Fiction

Pages: 272

Rating: 3/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Ebook; MMD 2020

Ginny Beale is eighteen, irreverent, funny, and brave, with a brother she adores and a circle of friends for whom she would do anything. Because of one terrible night, she loses them all—and her adventurous spirit—seemingly forever. While the town cheers on the high school football team, someone sets the school’s auditorium ablaze. Ginny’s best friend Gray Marsden’s father, a fire fighter, dies in the blaze.

While many in the town believe a notoriously troubled local teen set the fire, Ginny makes a shattering discovery that casts blame on the person she trusts most in the world. Ginny tells no one, but the secret isolates her, looming between her and her friends and ruining their friendship.

Over the next two decades, Ginny puts aside her wanderlust and her dreams. Moving back to her hometown, she distances herself from the past and from nearly everyone in it. She marries a quiet man, raises their daughter, Avery, and cares for her tyrannical, ailing mother, Adela. But when Ginny’s husband, Harris, becomes embroiled in a scandal, Ginny’s carefully controlled life crumbles, and, just when she believes she is regaining her bearings, the secret she’s kept for twenty years emerges and threatens to destroy her hopes for the future.

With the help of fifteen-year-old Avery and of friends both old and new, Ginny must summon the courage to confront old lies and hard truths and to free herself and the people she loves from the mistakes and regrets that have burdened them for so long.

This one was a dud for me. I never really engaged with the characters or the storyline. Something about both felt very immature to me. As for the characters, I kept thinking that adult Ginny was much much younger than she actually was. And Avery sometimes acted 12 and sometimes acted 20. I couldn’t get a good feel for any of them. Harris completely annoyed the crap out of me and I was mad at Ginny for not being more upset by his betrayal. And then we get to the big mystery of the fire. I just didn’t really care. I guessed the secret that Ginny was keeping from about when they revealed the fire. the second twist I didn’t see coming, but I didn’t even really care about it. Overall I was left with a big MEH feeling. Not my type of book.

Next up on the TBR pile: