Hidden

by Catherine McKenzie

[Leah]

A few years ago I read and absolutely loved Catherine McKenzie’s debut novel Spin. It was FANTASTIC. I literally whizzed through the book and I was massively surprised that this was Catherine’s debut novel. It was so assurred, so well written, so warm and funny and honest, and it put Catherine McKenzie on my must-buy-her-books-immediately-no-matter-what list. And I have stuck to that, although I must admit I haven’t gotten around to reading Arranged or Forgotten yet, which makes me so sad, because I am bloody desperate to read them, I just can’t get through my review books quick enough to actually read something I’ve bought! So it was with my immense pleasure that I spied Hidden, Catherine’s fourth novel, on Netgalley. I was super excited to be accepted to review the novel, and I dove in as soon as I’d cleared all my other ebooks!

Hidden was a very interesting read. I’m still, hours later, wondering how I feel about it, because I’m sort of torn. That last chapter really has a lot to answer for, because despite the fact that I know Jeff eventually made the right decision, it actually blew it up and made me question everything I’d previously read. I thought he’d made the right, proper decision, and then it all implodes in that last chapter, and changes what I thought of the novel, what I thought of Jeff, what I thought of Tish. Until then, it was all going very well and I was actually super interested in the novel. Claire was, of course, the character I most cared about. The character I wanted to read more from, always, and I was sort of rooting for her throughout, wanting her to discover just how close Tish and Jeff had gotten. But the novel really left me with so many questions – wondering why marriages just never seem to be as stable as you think, why someone who seems to be happily married (two people, in fact) and why it all goes awry when they meet someone else they might be attracted to.

I never condone cheating, I hate it. I think if you want to be with somebody else, then at least have the decency to let your partner know. It’s only polite! But, in Jeff and Tish’s case that wasn’t actually the case. Despite how much I loved Claire, and felt sorry for her, there was a part of me that enjoyed reading about Tish and Jeff’s ‘thing’. It all seemed to happen so organically, that if they were two single people I would have been rooting for them all the way to the final page, but their circumstances made it so difficult to root for them, and I just wanted them to give it up before it went beyond the point of return. The triple narrative didn’t really help, I’ll be honest, because Tish didn’t seem like an awful marriage-wrecker, and Jeff didn’t really seem the type to be a love rat, and it just seemed to make it all the more confusing! Catherine is a fantastic writer, of that there is no doubt, and she kept me reading all the way to the very end, even if the end did disappoint me immensely.

I suppose the reason the ending disappointed me was the whole theme of the novel – if you can not find out a piece of information that would devastate you, can you just let it be? That’s what Claire finds herself asking as the novel goes on, can she not know what Jeff was up to and be OK with that? Is not knowing better than knowing? And I sort of felt that way about the ending, I would have preferred not to have had the Epilogue. I would have left it out of the book, and just directed the reader to Catherine’s website if they wanted to see it, with a fair warning of that it might make you change your opinion of the novel. A Prologue can’t break a book, because you’re just at the beginning, but an Epilogue sure as hell can, and this was one which I would have preferred to not read, I’ll be honest. Because, as you can tell, it’s all I can talk about. But apart from that, I really enjoyed the novel. Catherine should have way more recognition than she has because she’s an amazing writer, who writes such fascinating, interesting books. I didn’t enjoy Hidden as much as Spin, I’ll be honest (Spin is AMAZING. You must read Spin.), but it did leave me with questions, and it did keep me hooked throughout with the fantastic narrative, I could have just done without the very last chapter, but I will still buy all of Catherine’s books, because they’re great, and this one was not as good as others of hers, but it was still very readable.