We Are the Brennans
by Tracey Lange
📖 | Genre: Fiction
⭐️| Rating: 4.25/5
📚| Review: We Are the Brennans is a story about an Irish family with deep secrets and complicated relationships. After a drunk-driving accident forces Sunday Brennan to return home after five years, she must confront the people she ran away from and revisit the trauma that caused her to leave. Through Sunday’s reintroduction to her brothers, Tracey Lange explores the different things that can drive us apart from loved ones as we get older and the effort it takes to become a family once again.
This book doesn’t shy away from drama and is filled with complicated characters that you want to sink your teeth into. The writing style was a seamless combination of scenes in present-day and flashbacks and written in a multiple character perspective that was never confusing. In fact, it added to the pace of the novel and helped keep the story moving even during the parts that were slower. We are the Brennans also has a strong sense of place that helped root all the secondary storylines back to the Brennan family and their determination to save their business and each other from making mistakes.
Read if you like:
There were two reasons I could not rate this book five stars. Firstly, though it was satisfying, the ending was predictable. Because I had figured it out fairly quickly, part of my reading was simply waiting for the characters to catch up and to see the painfully obvious explanation for a major plot point. Additionally, I felt that the main romantic storyline resolved itself far too easily. I wanted more acknowledgement of the realities of the situation and a little more heartbreak throughout the rekindling. Mostly, this book wrapped up too neatly for me given the messy situation so many of the characters had found themselves in.
Overall though, this book was really good. It was one that I had started and then set aside but I’m so glad I came back to it. If you pick it up, I would warn that it does start off slow and takes a few chapters to really become invested in. But, the payoff for the slower beginning is worth it. Fans of Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes will feel right at home with the Brennan family and the engrossing story Tracey Lange tells.
Gabriella's Goodreads 