The Half Moon - Mary Beth Keane - ★★

AUTHOR: Mary Beth Keane

GENRE: Contemporary Literary Fiction.

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A story about a husband and a wife who feel sorry for themselves and ended up making me feel sorry for myself for having picked this up. Marriage melodrama masquerading as literary fiction. This is an outlier review.

Story Synopsis:

Malcolm Gephardt, 45 – Owner of a bar named ‘The Half Moon’. Bar in losses. Malcolm desperate to get it back on its feet.

Jessica, 41 – Malcolm’s wife. Lawyer. Desperate for a child and willing to do anything to be a mother. Malcolm not in agreement.

Malcolm and Jessica separated four months ago.

This week, there’s news of a blizzard hitting their small town. The story takes place in the course of these seven days, where Malcolm has just heard an upsetting news about Jessica, and a regular patron of The Half Moon has gone missing.

The story comes to us in limited third person perspective mostly of Malcolm and some portions from Jessica.

Bookish Yays:

✔ There’s one point where Malcolm remarks to Jessica about IVF, and how it can lead to false hope, and how long can they keep trying because of that hope if earlier IVF attempts haven’t worked. I loved that scene because I have seen the same happen to friends who opted for IVF. That hope is a killer.

✔ A couple of quotable quotes.

✔ The cover – with its dual reference to the bar as well as the marriage of Jessica and Malcolm. Real smart design.

Bookish Nays:

❌ Main characters who are in their forties but behave as if they are in their twenties. Jessica and Malcolm have many secrets from each other despite their long relationship. This should have made them realistic, but their baseless self-pity and shoddy decision-making made me loathe them instead of rooting for them. When I can’t feel sympathetic even towards a woman who is desperate to be a mother, the book is a lost cause.

❌ The secondary characters are as flat as a soda kept out for a day.

❌ Slow writing that is worsened by our lack of empathy with the characters.

❌ The narrative chronology, which, while limited to a week, goes meandering across past and present like nobody’s business.

❌ A missing person story doing in a novel about a couple struggling with their separation and its aftermath - What the heck! That track was relevant just to a minimal degree, and the book would have worked better without that distraction.

❌ The key ingredient in a marriage story is passion. Not the romantic kind, but strong feelings, whether in moments of love or during arguments. But Jessica and Malcolm have serious discussions with as much emotion as if they were talking about the grocery list. (Heck, I make my grocery list with more emotions!)

❌ I might have liked the small town depiction of this story (with its nosy characters who know everything about others and nothing about themselves) had I not been reading another novel set in a small town that has handled the same brilliantly. This felt staid in comparison.

❌ The ending. Good God! Why, why, why? The whole character build-up went for a toss with that decision. I might still have rated this higher had the ending been realistic. But HFN and HEA endings make sense only when they proceed logically from the plot and not a pull-the-rug finale like this none. 

This book ought to have worked for me as it had so many ingredients I relish in fiction: flawed characters, marital struggles, parenting problems. Heck, I even love literary fiction for the way it brings depth to the characters . But this time, nada! I felt nothing for anything and anyone during this read.

I can’t help recollect the song, ‘You say it best, when you say nothing at all.’ So I”ll just stop here and hope that it’s for the best.

Kindly read other reviews before you make up your mind about this title because for me, this book stands as ‘Not recommended’, and as we all know, no two readers read the same book. 

My thanks to Scribner and NetGalley for the DRC of “The Half Moon”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.

Content warnings: Miscarriage, Infidelity.