This was really not good. I gave it two stars for at least keeping me reading. The ending was such a letdown.

Full review:

"Something in Common" follows aspiring writer Sarah and journalist Helen. The two women have a meeting and go their separate ways, and then later on due to circumstances get to know each other via letters they send and continue in each other's lives for several decades.

I thought that Helen had the more interesting story line. Widowed at a young age and feeling left unmoored by that and her young daughter, I liked that she wasn't a lightweight and pushed back when necessary. Sarah's storyline takes a while to get interesting, but I felt like most of her plotline was that she was just not very aware of anything going on in her life. The secondary characters outside of Helen's daughter didn't feel very developed.

Honestly the biggest issue I had with this is that Meaney kept throwing up roadblocks to these two women meeting. It started to get old after a while. And you could see the plotlines with Sarah coming a mile away. It just didn't ring true after a while.

The flow was pretty awful, it took a while to get used to the back and forths and a few times I had to go back to read what the year was and what was going on in the two women's lives. I think at one point we had a 3 year jump and then some other jumps with things alluded to later.

The setting of the book takes place in Ireland in the 1960s and through the 1990s.

The biggest issue I had was the ending.

Spoiler

I thought it was pretty shoddy to have Sarah killed and Helen goes to the funeral and decides to not interact with her family because Sarah is dead and what is the point. It made zero sense, leaves you feeling unfulfilled and doesn't make sense since we all know at that point that Sarah and Helen's family know about the other. Most of them are going to think she's rude and didn't care. Oh well.