Mo, Edith, Jacob, along with their parents have all gathered together for Passover at Mo's home. Their mother is very ill, and this might be their last year together.
For the sake of their mother, the children have decided to kill their father.
Throughout the book, you get to see through the eyes of each of the siblings. We see their father as a raging tyrant from childhood onward. More than once we see him trying to harm or even kill his own children.
What you don't see much of is their mother. Rarely does she show up in the backstory and the result of that is that you don't much care for her. At least I didn't. Why should I care if they kill their father for her? She is almost a non-entity.
Meanwhile, the narrators are also rather unlikeable. Jacob is whiny, Mo is egocentric and materialistic, and I'm pretty sure Edith has some sort of dangerous personality disorder.
Sure, Julian Jacobson is a clearly loathsome character, but the children and wife don't have a lot going for them.
I put the novel down several times to read other books in between. It wasn't bad enough to give up on entirely as I have other books (see A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing) but it didn't grab me.
Meanwhile, in the distant future of 2022, the world has become very anti-Semitic (much like our current anti-Muslim world view). Other than the fact that Jacob's boyfriend is German I don't see where it added to the story at all. Enid ran into a couple of unpleasant people, and suicide bombings are mentioned throughout the book, but overall it played no part in the larger story aside from the very end which could have been re-written to keep from having all the other pointless moments from the rest of the book.
Unfortunately, overall, I don't see myself recommending this book to anyone. If you want to give it a try anyway, Tell Me How This Ends Well is available in multiple formats on Amazon.
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I received my copy of Tell Me How This Ends Well for free from Blogging For Books. All opinions are my own.
