Get Away - with Family Drama and Romance!

The Wrong Way to Wright is full of schemers! Everyone is scheming towards their own ends, and you the listener are best positioned to know or guess their intentions and motives. There's lust and restraint, fidelity and infidelity, settling and wanting more, masculinity explored in its many forms, gossip and secrets, betrayals and loyalty. It's a story rich with the conflicts and themes of real life. And though it's not your happily-ever-after tidy ending, the author gives every character, including Desi, some satisfaction in the end.

The story is set on a Caribbean island where the odds of people 'knowing your personal business' are high. Even so, there are some life-changing unknowns and secrets, which emerge towards the end as unexpected twists.

I loved that there were no pure villains or pure heroes. Aya is our protagonist and the man she married to escape her debts and pave her way to a new career path - Desi, her antagonist. Marva, Marlon, Pearl and Bea are other important characters. None of these are blameless and yet all of them are sinned against. Marva was my favourite character and Desi the one I sympathised with most - perhaps because almost all the other characters in some way aimed their scheming against him! The most mischievous characters had their redeeming qualities and we could understand their very human motives, despite their shocking manipulations!

I loved the way the novel embraces hard subjects and gives them to us without flinching: with Marva and her mother, we witness the difficulty of being a carer for a parent who never cared for you and whom you haven't forgiven. Both Aya and Desi have serious medical conditions which they battle with alone for the most part. Marrying an older man for financial security isn't an uncommon thing. But it can be a painful struggle for both parties if love and passion don't find a footing in the mix.

I really enjoyed this story the first time I read it, and was curious about the audio version. It's read by the author, whom I discovered has a soothing voice - the kind that makes it easy to get away from the noise in your own head and lose yourself in the story. The audio version definitely captures the narrative drama. It's a novel with lots of dialogue, full of characters internally conflicted and in conflict with each other- and that may be why it lends itself well to being told by audio.

Happy listening!

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