Book Review: This Is Not Over

Book Summary:

Miranda is a host who rents out a California cottage for infrequent stays by couples and families in need of  a little vacation.

The other woman, Dawn, is one of the clients who rented her cottage for a long weekend getaway with her husband. After she and her husband spent good money for this getaway, she is quite disappointed with their stay.

In her mind, her dissatisfaction is due to things about the rental that did not meet her expectations. At least she has pin-pointed this event as being the culprit for her unhappiness.

So she writes a bad review on the site where Miranda lists her rental. Which enrages Miranda and hurts her business.

Then Dawn takes it a step further.

Then they both start taking things a step further. And further. Their mutual dislike starts to take over as they focus on the other as being the bearer of all bad things that are currently happening to them.

Miranda is in her late fifties. Her husband is a doctor and makes good money. But their only child is 27 and a drug addict. And is a source of the continual draining of her own financial resources.

Her husband cut him off and he thought she did too. So she is secretly funding what she hopes is his rent with the money she gets from renting out her parents’ beach home for these getaways.

Dawn has gone back to school and is about to finish her degree in Communications. But as she nears the end of her education, she realizes she doesn’t really know what she wants to do when she graduates. Which is making her more than a bit anxious.

She came from a poor and dysfunctional home and has tried very hard to put distance between who she was then and who she is now with her husband.

And somehow she has come to blame Miranda for all the evils in the world. Likewise, Miranda has come to focus all her troubles on Dawn.

Two very different women with this in common: Each harbors her own secret, her own reason why she can’t just let this go. Neither can yield, not before they’ve dredged up all that’s hidden, even if it has the power to shatter all they’ve built.

About The Author:

Holly Brown is (in no particular order): a novelist, wife, mother, marriage and family therapist, poker enthusiast, resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, lover of some incredibly shameful reality TV, devotee of NPR (she owes a debt of gratitude for inspiring more than one novel), and a believer that people should always be willing to make mistakes and always be the first to apologize for them.

As a writer, she tends to be inspired by contemporary events and phenomena. With her first novel Don’t Try to Find Me, she was intrigued by a real-life story about how a parent’s use of social media helped find a runaway daughter. In A Necessary End, she was compelled by all the maddening hoops that people have to jump through in order to adopt a newborn and what this does to their psychologies and their relationships.

This is Not Over is an escalating cat-and-mouse between two women after a house rental goes wrong. She likes to take an emotionally charged situation and then imagine the people within it. That’s where her background in human dynamics comes into play, and where the fun begins.