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Book: Falling Home by Karen White

Plot summary: Falling Home centers on the Madison sisters, Cassie and Harriet. Fifteen years prior to the start of the novel Cassie moved to New York City, began going by Cassandra, disguised her Southern accent, and cut off all contact with her sister and the rest of her family (save her father). During those fifteen years, Harriet had gotten married and given birth to five children. When Cassie is forced to return to their tiny hometown of Walton, Georgia, she has to face the ghost of her past along with a family crisis. Ultimately Cassie is faced with a crucial decision: stay in Walton or return to New York. 

Review: White's books follow a predictable, familiar pattern and Falling Home was no exception. That doesn't I mean I didn't love it. After Dragon Tattoo I needed a book like this one: something that was uplifting and easy to lose myself in. Falling Home is well written and a perfect beach read. It's the kind of book you take into the bathtub along with a glass of wine. There's something so unbelievably relatable about the characters in the book. I always see a little of myself in at least one of White's characters but in this one I identified strongly with Cassie. Unlike other beach reads where characters feel fictional, the characters in Falling Home felt like real people. They come across as actual people from your life and not caricatures of people in a small town. For a lighter read, the characters are quite multidimensional. There's depth to them and they develop as the novel progresses. Honestly that's one of my biggest complaints about many books: lack of character development.  It's a romance novel, a family drama, and a story of self-discovery all rolled into one without being too weighty. If you're going on vacation or just need to take your mind off life for a while without feeling like you're losing brain cells in the process, I highly recommend Falling Home. 

Rating: 4 out of 5