The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D

Author:  Nichole Bermier

Year:  2012

Publisher:  Crown Publishers

Pages:  305

Goodreads Summary:

Before there were blogs, there were journals. And in them we’d write as we really were, not as we wanted to appear. But there comes a day when journals outlive us. And with them, our secrets.

Summer vacation on Great Rock Island was supposed to be a restorative time for Kate, who’d lost her close friend Elizabeth in a sudden accident. But when she inherits a trunk of Elizabeth's journals, they reveal a woman far different than the cheerful wife and mother Kate thought she knew.

The complicated portrait of Elizabeth—her troubled upbringing, and her route to marriage and motherhood—makes Kate question not just their friendship, but her own deepest beliefs about loyalty and honesty at a period of uncertainty in her own marriage.

The more Kate reads, the more she learns the complicated truth of who Elizabeth really was, and rethinks her own choices as a wife, mother, and professional, and the legacy she herself would want to leave behind. When an unfamiliar man’s name appears in the pages, Kate realizes the extent of what she didn’t know about her friend, including where she was really going on the day she died.

Set in the anxious summer after the September 11th attacks, this story of two women—their friendship, their marriages, private ambitions and fears—considers the aspects of ourselves we show and those we conceal, and the repercussions of our choices.

I won this book in a blog tour shortly before it's publication. I heard a lot about it on book podcasts and was interested in reading it but just never picked it up. I got sick last week (which I rarely do) and picked this book up to read because it felt like comfort food and it really was. It was such a beautiful book. I loved the way the story of Elizabeth in the journals is woven in with Kate and her story. It was a very interesting way to tell a story.