THE END OF THE DAY

THE END OF THE DAY

BY BILL CLEGG

“I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing.
Out here it’s like I’m someone else,
I thought that maybe I could find myself.
If I could just come in, I swear I’ll leave.
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me.”
– The House That Built Me, written by Tom Douglas and Alan Shamblin

Families and relationships are funny things. A few words, a few simple choices, can change everything. But it’s what comes after those things, when we decide how we’re going to handle the aftermath, that creates the lives we finally lead. At the end of it all we’re left wondering what’s real and what isn’t, and what of any of it really matters.

Bill Clegg has done it again in his new novel, The End of the Day. As in his other beautiful book, Did You Ever Have a Family, he has entwined the lives of so many people with their hopes and dreams, with their hurt and sorrow, with their pleasure and contentment. Like the young woman who wants nothing more than to be a wife to her teenage crush, like the childhood best friends whose differences become more and more apparent as they get older. Like the solitary young woman who gave up what she needed to give up because there was no other way for her. And like the young man caught in everyone’s world without even knowing it.

There were a lot of characters in this novel. I must admit, at first there were too many for me to keep track of. At a third of the way through, I had to go back and start over, because the names and relationships were confusing to me. After I did that, though, everything fell into place and I couldn’t put the book down. I’ll also say that the confusion may have been because I had to interrupt my reading for a couple of days and then came back to it, so remembering everyone and their parts in the drama was a bit challenging. Others may not find this to be a problem at all.

The prose was beautiful, and I became as entangled with the story as the characters were with each other. The ending was just as life is, not necessarily perfect, which made it the most perfect ending of all.

Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books/Scout Press for an ARC in exchange for my honest review