An interesting story about a woman living life after her husband cheats on her then divorces her. Liz makes some questionable choices based in anger?hurt? even though the divorce happened years prior. I liked the ending when Liz was finally able to start moving on and making amends for some of her behavior.

I absolutely loved this book! I found it hard to put down. I highly recommend reading it! You won’t be disappointed.

Unfortunately this book was not for me. I think that others may enjoy it because the writing style is amazing. For me personally, I could not get into the story and found myself day dreaming often.

Her Turn is a character driven, debut novel by the talented Katherine Ashenburg. Katherine is a skilled writer but, unfortunately, the plot fell flat for me.

In Her Turn, we are alongside Liz, who a decade after her husband left her for another woman, is still simmering in her own anger. This plays out in her life in different ways and impacts the various people to whom she is close. Liz is a talented editor at a publication called Her Turn. When she gets an entry from her ex husband’s wife, she strikes up an anonymous relationship with the other woman.

I will definitely read more novels by Katherine Asheburg, because it is obvious she is an amazing author. However, I didn’t find Liz a likeable character (and typically I loved flawed characters) and also found the plot to be very heavy in character development but very light in intrigue.

A sincere thank you to Netgalley, Penguin Random House and Knopf Canada for the digital ARC.

3 stars

This is charming in a messy, verisimilitude type of way. I can see why the marketing would go with Nora Ephram-esk. It’s very good at dredging up lots of different emotions in the day-to-day. While it does take a moment to shift gears into the writing voice and the narrator herself, especially because it feels a bit monotonous at first, it really finds its stride on the building blocks of the first act—not to mention the structure of each chapter, which is each week broken up on a day planet for our editor protagonist, Liz.

What’s really ingenious about this is that the minutia, especially concerning what Liz is specifically editing that day/week, acts as a vector, vehicle, and springboard at any given time. Even as Liz puts a piece of writing into the context of her own life and ascribes it meaning, it naturally asks the reader the same. Then it becomes pertinent to the plot as well. It’s really satisfying and smart. I’m not sure I’ve seen a device deployed much like it?

I worried about “liking” or understanding Liz to get behind her voice as a protagonist for a while because of the kind of moral flexibility that she seemed to be projecting, but it actually works quite well; contradictory character traits and actions end up almost as being good, not to mention proponents of good drama.

In any case, I laughed out loud multiple times, winced, and was surprised. I am very happy I went out of my usual reading comfort zone to try it out. Hope this finds the audience it deserves.

As for formatting, it isn't formatted properly for kindle whatsoever. There are no chapter breaks, no paragraph spacing. Sometimes paragraphs were broken up many times with no indentations so it looked like poetry but was just a few sentences indented. It genuinely made the book very hard to read and impossible to evaluate stylistically.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for an ARC of Her Turn in exchange for an honest review. Unfortunately I could not get into this book and could not finish it. I read over half the book but felt as if I was only reading because I had to, not because I was enjoying the story. I don't actually know what the book is about. There was no real conflict and character development seemed to be non-existent. This book was, sadly, not for me. The main character was hard to relate to or root for. This book fell short for me unfortunately.