I love stories that see the lives of well-developed characters intersecting and that’s exactly what I hoped this novel would be based on the title. I was not disappointed. Nine people arrive at a health spa in the middle of nowhere in order to go through a ten-day transformative process – each carries a certain level of angst or trauma about them, and each responds differently to the rather bizarre processes at Tranquillum House.
A woman named Frances is (kind of) the main character. She’s a novelist who is worried about being washed up after her latest novel fails to attract any interest from publishers. She’s also just recently found out that her long distance partner was a scam artist. She’s a likeable and personable character and having her as the point-of-view character you see most often works well, because you get a bit of levity between the heavier chapters. Later on, her being a novelist leads to some extremely meta chapters, and I enjoyed that quite a bit too.
However, the most interesting guests in Tranquillum House are the Marconi family. Perfectly happy and healthy on the surface, but dealing with a terrible loss underneath. Their story is a terribly sad one. I won’t spoil the details, as they’re slowly revealed throughout the course of the novel, but these were the characters that I felt the most invested and I felt that they were all incredibly well written.
The other most notable character is Masha – she’s the founder of Tranquillum House and rather mysterious, vaguely sinister person. I actually found myself getting caught up in the things she was saying, which I thought was a pretty good way of showing how everyone there would as well. The developments with her towards the end were very unexpected, and made the latter portion of the book much more tense than I anticipated. It was perhaps slightly too over the top for me, but it did make for captivating reading – and there were various clever twist about everything not quite being what it seemed.
Not all of the characters were quite so captivating – such as Jessica and Ben, a young couple whose marriage is falling apart since winning the lottery. They still felt very real, and their presence still added to the story, but I was usually more interested to get back to a chapter from the perspective of one of the other characters whenever it was one of their POVs. I suppose that will inevitably happen whenever you have quite a big cast in a novel.
Altogether, if you like realistic, relatable human drama (with just a hint of the sensational) then this is a book is one that you will probably enjoy. I didn’t like it quite as much as the other Liane Moriarty book I’ve read (Big Little Lies) as that one felt like it had a little more to say, but nonethless, Nine Perfect Strangers shows that Moriarty is capable of creating a large range of different and believable characters and tying them together with a decent storyline.
Rating: 8.4/10
