Read with Fern

I had one burning question throughout this whole book, and I’m sure you will too:
Is Damien in the meatballs at any point in time?? And the answer is:

(Please remember you clicked a spoiler-filled summary)

Yes!

And isn’t that fun! Who even needs a summary at that point?
Just kidding. This book was insane from start to finish.

A quick list of characters involved:

• Thea Woods
• Ruthie – Thea’s daughter
• Jacob – Thea’s husband
• Cassandra Hanes – Thea’s boss & owner of the publishing house
• Maria Capello
• Damien Capello – Maria’s husband
• Izzy Capello – Maria’s daughter
• Ava – Izzy’s daughter
• Enzo Capello – Maria’s son
• Amy Ryan – Enzo’s girlfriend
• Hank Casey – Maria’s cousin
• Nina Casey – Hank’s wife

I’m going to go in mostly chronological order, but I’m going to start with Thea.

• Thea is an editor at a small publishing house.
• She had been climbing the ranks, working closely with the owner, Cassandra, for years.
• Thea took an extended maternity leave when she had Ruthie, and her re-entrance at work was difficult.
• Thea’s first project after returning was a memoir for a well-known politician named Kincaid Hughes.
• Despite a glowing reputation, Thea can’t help but feel there’s something off about Hughes.
• Thea starts casually asking around and almost immediately finds out Hughes is really gross with young women.
• There’s even a girl who shares screenshots of aggressive and sexual messages from Hughes that she received while working for him.
• Thea is appalled, and the girl explains that she signed an NDA, so even sharing the screenshots with Thea could technically get her in trouble.
• Thea takes her evidence to Cassandra, asking her to cancel the book deal. Cassandra explains that as a small publishing house with a book weeks away from being published, it’s financially not possible.
• She agrees to vet authors more in the future, but tells Thea to just buckle up and shut up.
• Then Thea goes to a networking event for Jacob’s work. She’s still freshly postpartum, and gets fully drunk on a half glass of wine.
• During the event, she finds herself talking to another young woman, and the subject of Kincaid Hughes comes out again.
• She tells the woman all about the secret screenshots she has, and how much she hates Kincaid.
• The next morning, an anonymous social media page has posted videos of Thea’s drunken ramblings and has released all the screenshots Thea had on her phone.
• The book’s sales are practically non-existent, with booksellers pulling their orders. Thea claims innocence, but regardless of the truth, she has bankrupted the publishing house.

Now we jump forward a few years.

• Thea is still employed at the publishing house, but is still being actively outcast at every turn.
• She gets called into Cassandra’s office, and Cassandra explains she was going to fire Thea this week, but in light of new events, she’s decided not to.
  As a side note right from the first chapter, how in the world do you cost a company millions of dollars and then keep your job for an additional 2 years before getting fired?? Literally in Thea’s explanation, she’s just done paperwork for 2 years. I don’t understand.
• Maria Capello, a famous TV chef with dozens of cookbooks, has decided to use a new publishing company for her memoir.
• She has picked their publishing house, and has specifically requested Thea as her editor.
• Thea is a lifelong fan of Maria’s, but Maria would have no way of knowing that, so Thea and Cassandra are both completely confused.
• They meet with Maria and her team, and Maria tells Thea she choose her because of a book Thea had edited a few years ago.
• Maria then explains that she had a lot of leaked book information at her old publishing company, which is part of why she decided to find a new company for the memoir.
• Because of the leaks, she has very strict rules for her memoir’s manuscript. There’s only one, and it’s a paper copy. There will be no digital copies.
• To read the manuscript, Thea must come to Maria’s family farm in upstate New York.
• Despite having a fussy toddler and a less-than-helpful husband, Thea agrees. She heads home to tell her husband she’s leaving that weekend, has signed an NDA, and can only tell him it’s to stay with an author.
  Second side note: Her husband Jacob SUCKS. The first chapter of this book had me convinced we were going to experience two dead husbands, not just one. He is the definition of a man-child who has a wife and child, but does not act like a husband or father. And apparently that’s foreshadowing that he’s exactly like Damien? Whatever.
• So Thea arrives at Maria’s huge farm, with hundreds of acres, multiple barns, and limited cell reception or wifi. She’s given a room to stay in, and quickly meets all of Maria’s weird family.
• Maria’s granddaughter, Ava, pops out of the barn during Thea’s tour, and is very precocious.
• Maria’s daughter Izzy is just casually nursing in the dark in Thea’s room, and has no clue her young daughter has been napping with pigs all day.
• At dinner, Thea meets Maria’s son Enzo, and his girlfriend, Amy.
• During dinner, it’s made clear that Enzo and Izzy don’t want Maria writing the memoir, which stirs up a lot of dissent.
• And while Thea’s trying to ignore the awkwardness, she realizes where she’s met Amy before.
• Amy was the girl she talked to at Jacob’s work event, aka the only person with all the information to create the viral videos about Kincaid Hughes and almost cost Thea her job.

We then begin a very long segment I’m going to call “Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girl Boss.”

• When Thea arrived, Maria took her phone, but let her keep her laptop, and promised there’d be wifi.
• Then Maria shuts off the wifi and says it’s not working.
• Thea has trouble sleeping, so Maria gives her a “family” remedy that makes Thea groggy and disoriented.
• Life on the farm goes on, which means Maria’s cousin Hank just shows up and shoots pigs at 5am so he can butcher them.
• Ava starts looking very jaundiced and weak, and Thea watches her drink a cup of what appears to be blood. Izzy claims she had a bloody nose and it must’ve gotten in the cup.
• Thea confronts Amy, who admits she only started dating Enzo to get into the farm. She admits that she’s the one who exposed Hughes, and tells Thea to get over it and help her expose the Capellos.
• Thea is wary of Amy, and follows some of her interactions with a few people in the tiny neighboring town. She doesn’t go to Maria with her observations.
• Thea’s car has a brand new nail in the tire, leaving her stranded on the farm, relying on the family for rides into town for wifi access.
• Amy goes missing, and Thea can’t find her anywhere.
• She finds Amy’s little notebook that Amy calls her insurance policy on the floor of the butchering area. She also finds Ava, sleeping with the piglets. As she gets Ava, she sees a man who looks shockingly like Damien start looking for something in the farm. She sneaks out with Ava.
• Then Thea remembers Amy mentioned Damien has another son, and assumes the man must be him.
• While searching for Amy, she also meets Nina, Hank’s wife. Except Hank said Nina left 20 years ago. And Nina is terrified of the Capello family, saying they’ll kill her next.

TL;DR: Things get weird on the Capello farm, Thea is almost immediately isolated from everyone and everything, while the Capellos assure her everything is fine.

After literally 72% of this book, we get to the real meat of the episode.
In the 90s, Damien’s clothes were found by a creek on the farm after a large party he and Maria hosted. There was also a suicide note left behind. The note had somehow made its way to the newspapers at some point, but not before the general public was convinced Maria killed her husband, and ground him up into their restaurant’s famous meatballs.

Now, guess what didn’t happen. If you said a suicide, you’d be correct. Let’s dive into Maria & Damien’s early timeline:

• Maria and Damien start working at a restaurant together and fall in love.
• At the same time, Damien impregnates another woman.
• Maria and Damien get married, and open a restaurant together.
• After having Izzy and then Enzo, Maria becomes a stay-at-home mom.
• After the kids are back in school, she wants to come back to the restaurant, but Damien’s insistent she continue to be a stay-at-home mom and “finally relax.”
• So Maria starts sneakily going back to the restaurant, and catches him having sex with Nina, Hank’s wife.
• Then Maria decides to kill Damien.
• Then she finds out Damien and Nina are planning on running away the night of a huge party Maria and Damien are hosting.
• She tells Hank everything, and convinces him to help her kill Damien and then stage it like a suicide.

With me so far? Great! Prepare to lost the plot completely!

• The party is going on at the Capello farm.
• Maria catches Damien & Nina talking about their escape.
• Then she finds the note from Damien that she eventually uses to stage his suicide. She leaks the first page to the newpapers, which reads like a suicide note. But the second page is all about how Damien has found happiness with someone else, and is leaving, and hopes she can find love with someone else.
• She’s about to confront Damien when a teenage boy shows up.
• A teenage boy named Jacob (yes, Jacob, as in Thea’s husband Jacob).
• Jacob is yelling, saying that Damien’s his dad, and has been paying alimony for years, but just stopped and said they were having money issues at the moment.
  This was the moment I decided I was furious with the plot. First of all, I knew Jacob was going to be a part of this and it drove me insane. Second, Damien would be paying child support, not alimony, and that will bug me every day for the next 3 months.
• Jacob goes to hit Damien, just as 8-year-old Enzo appears and jumps in front of Damien to protect him. Which means Jacob hits Enzo.
• To Maria’s credit, she knows the hit wasn’t on purpose, but Enzo’s nose has started to bleed and is clearly broken.
• But also, she really needs to kill Damien.
• Then, inexplicably, Jacob pulls out a gun and shoots Damien.
• Maria convinces Jacob to take Enzo to the hospital. Damien has a very specific type, so she asks if Jacob’s mom looks like her. Jacob says yes, and she tells Jacob to have his mom meet them at the hospital and pretend to be Maria. This gives Maria an alibi and speeds up Enzo’s treatment. (Because God forbid you make your 8-year old suffer longer with a broken nose so you can KILL HIS DAD.)
• Once the boys leave, Maria grabs Hank and they go to stage the body like the suicide as they’re already planned.
• BUT THE BODY IS GONE! (Not in a resurrection-type way, but boy was this plot getting close to using that as a option).
• Damien had survived the one shot from a teenage boy with little gun experience, and he and Nina had escaped into the night.
• Maria and Hank stage the suicide anyways, as a punishment for Damien. Now, for him to ever return to his old life, he’d have to admit he left Maria, and got shot by his secret bastard of a kid.
• Key thing here: Maria lets Jacob believe he killed his father and that Maria covered it up for him out of the goodness of her heart.

All right, back to the present:

• Jacob appears on the farm, ready to save Thea.
• He tells her his side of the story, with Maria gently encouraging him, and never mentioning that Damien is still alive.
• They come to an agreement that “family comes first.”
• The manuscript Thea’s been reading is a twisted version of events, but it’s well-written, and quickly goes through the editing process.
• Amy was totally fine, and had literally just skipped town. Maria coaches Thea on how to approach Amy, and nothing Amy writes about the Capello family is taken seriously.
• Ava was almost deathly ill as Thea and Jacob left the farm. Then she and Izzy were out the country for a while, and when they came back, Ava was perfectly healthy.

A year or so later, Maria and Thea reconnect at Maria’s book launch party. Thea confronts Maria on everything from the past that hasn’t made sense to her. And while Maria doesn’t give Thea any answers, she does give the reader some answers.

• Damien and Nina just lived a quiet life for the years they were “in hiding.”
• Maria lured Damien back to the farm by creating some rumors that she’d buried money on the farmland.
• Maria wanted to lure Damien back because Ava needed a kidney donation. Izzy had already donated a kidney that failed, and Maria and Enzo weren’t true matches. Maria was convinced Damien would be a perfect match.
  And I know what you’re thinking because it’s what I was thinking. What about Jacob and Ruthie, Ava’s half-uncle and cousin? Why go straight for the man in his 70s? I literally don’t know, and had to ask a nurse friend if a 5-year-old’s body would even accept a 70-year-old kidney. She was hesitant to give me a yes, which made this plot point even more infuriating.
• Maria caught Damien and kept him locked in her meat freezer.
• When Thea saw Ava drinking something like blood, it was blood. Damien’s blood.
• Maria kept him just alive enough to shove his kidney onto a plane that went directly to a hospital in Mexico where they performed a second kidney transplant on Ava.
• Maria’s family motto is “We don’t waste any part of the body.” This comes from the FAMILY TRADITION of killing your husband and eating every part of his body to hide the evidence and keep your kids healthy. They even take the bones and grind it into a dust to use as seasoning.
  Note 1 on this: why are we forcing children to eat their father’s bodies??????
  Note 2 on this: Maria’s “secret seasoning” is just bone dust, possibly combined with dried husband meat. I can’t believe that actually tastes like anything.

Overall, this book went from a high possibility of a 5 star review, to dragging on so much I dropped it to a 4 star, to going so far off the walls that giving it a 3 star review almost feels too nice. But I will never forget the plot, that’s for sure!!!