The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve ~ book review

Kathryn lives with her pilot husband and their 15 year old daughter in her dream home in New England.  She is living the life she wanted:  a loving husband, a job she likes teaching in a high school, a home by ocean, a daughter they both adore.  While her life may not be super exciting, it is definitely satisfying.  The hard parts are the loneliness when her husband is away  flying one of his routes.  Then one night when her husband is gone, she is awakened to banging on the door and she gets the visit no pilot's wife ever wants to get, that her husband's plane has crashed off the coast of Ireland and there are no survivors.

As she tries to walk through the grief and anguish and help her daughter through it,  the endless scrutiny of what led to the crash and her husband's part in it start to take their toll.  When rumors start to swell that this may have been no accident and that her husband had a secret life Kathryn is determined to find the truth while still protecting their daughter.  But as even as she digs for answers does she really want to know the truth?
 
I vaguely knew what the story was about having watched the movie many, many years ago but couldn't quite remember what went on but did sort of remember the twist.  I forgot about one large aspect of it, something in stories that I don't like to read about, but remembered liking the "mystery" aspect of it.  The story dragged at times and seemed slow moving, there is a lot of grief for Kathryn to deal with, but there was enough to what was happening that it did make me want to find out what was going on.  But all in all it was a book I did not really enjoy because of some of the subject matter and the whole thing was just sad and infuriating to me.

Because of that I struggled with a rating.  I didn't want to lower a rating because of personal preference to a story line but it did definitely color how much I enjoyed the story.   I finally decided on 7/10.