The Daylight Marriage

The Daylight Marriage

Heidi Pitlor

Genre: Fiction, Mystery

Summary (from Goodreads): Hannah was the kind of woman who turned heads. Tall and graceful, naturally pretty, often impulsive, always spirited, the upper-class girl who picked, of all men, Lovell--the introverted climate scientist, the practical one who thought he could change the world if he could just get everyone to listen to reason. After a magical honeymoon they settled in the suburbs to raise their two children.

But over the years, Lovell and Hannah’s conversations have become charged with resentments and unspoken desires. She’s become withdrawn and directionless. His work affords him a convenient distraction. The children can sense the tension, which they’ve learned to mostly ignore. Until, after one explosive argument, Hannah vanishes. And Lovell, for the first time, is forced to examine the trajectory of his marriage through the lens of memory--and the eyes of his children. As he tries to piece together what happened to his wife--and to their lives together--readers follow Hannah through that single day when the smallest of decisions takes her to places she never intended to go.

With the intensity of The Lovely Bones, the balance of wit and heartbreak of The Descendants, and the emotional acuity of Anne Tyler’s work, The Daylight Marriage is at its heart a novel about what happens when our intuitions override our logic, with a page-turning plot that doesn’t reveal its secrets until the very end.
 
Review:  This was a quick read and an interesting story about a wife who has gone missing.  Written from the husband's perspective moving forward, and the wife's perspective about the day she went missing, it was interesting to see their separate reflections about themselves, each other, and their marriage.  Unfortunately, I couldn't stand any of the characters, so it was hard to actually like the book.  The teenage daughter was especially horrible.

Rating: 2.5 stars