Exposure by Ava Dellaira ~ a Review

by Susan Roberts

A life-changing moment encompasses conflicting truths that echo across time, in this powerful, provocative debut.

One night, two people, four sides of a story.

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site. A free book was provided for an honest review.

September 2024; Zibby Books; 978-1958506677
ebook, print (400 pages); women's fiction

This character-based novel follows the lives of four main characters. It's basically about family - not just family by blood by also family based on the people who are closest to you.  There is also a major thread of grief and truth.  It goes into the pasts of the four main characters and how their pasts affected the people that they are today.

In 2004 Juliette who was a white freshman in college and Noah who was a black high school senior connect with each other and end up going home together.  Juliette had been Noah's poetry teacher during his senior year.  Noah gradually forgets about their one-night stand and is consumed by his desire to be a success in Hollywood as a writer.  He has married Jesse and they are really happy together.  She finds success as an author which makes her feel even worse about himself because he feels that he should be taking care of her.  Growing up Juliette and Annie were best friends -- well more than just friends.  They loved each other deeply but things changed when Juliette went to NYC to college and they each had their own lives.  Once Juliette dies, Annie finds herself consumed with her memories of her best friend and lover.  When Annie reads Juliette's journal, she finds that Noah may have inadvertently been the reason for her best friend's death.  She has the power to destroy Noah's success as a writer in Hollywood.  When she decides to go ahead and expose Noah, his life takes a turn for the worse - both his marriage and his career.  But the real question is -- what is the real truth?

This was a rather dark book but was well written with a few surprises along the way.  My problem is that I didn't like most of the main characters.  I thought that Juliette and Annie were difficult for me to like because of their lifestyles and the choices that they made.  I didn't like Noah much either.  He put his dreams of success above everything else in his life including his family.  I thought that  Jesse was the most likable of all of the main characters  The story itself is very interesting and asks the reader to decide who was right and who was wrong in the he said/she said exposure.

Buy Exposure at Amazon 

Susan Roberts grew up in Michigan but loves the laid-back life at her home in the Piedmont area of North Carolina where she is two hours from the beach to the east and the mountains in the west.  She reads almost anything but her favorite genres are Southern Fiction and Historical Fiction.   

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