How not to tell a story: a critical review of Together by Julie Cohen

Warning: this review contains spoilers, so if you have not read the book yet and don't want to know how it ends, please do not read this review.

Robbie and Emily they have been together for decades. Now, their joints are creaking and their eyesight is failing - but their love for each other is as fresh and fierce as the day they first met. They have had children and grandchildren, lived full and happy and intimate lives.

But they have been keeping a secret since the day they met, when their lives changed forever. Over the years, the sacrifices and choices they made have sealed their fates together.

Did they do the right thing? Read their story, and you decide.

This is how the book was described and when I first read the blurb, it really appealed to me. But once I read the book, I quickly realised that the book does not really live up to the praise heaped on it. And when I finished it, I saw how much potential this book had, and what a shame it was that it did not deliver on the very promising premise.

Too much mystery for the reader

The synopsis already gives away that Robbie and Emily live with a secret. But the secret is not revealed to the reader until the end of the book. Now, in some books this may work very well. But not in Together. The secret is alluded to liberally throughout the book. This mystery is the driving force for a LOT of Robbie and Emily's decision, but without the reader knowing what the secret it, there is no way for the reader to fully understand or empathise with the couple. This in turn makes it very hard for the reader to connect with the main characters in the book - not a good place to start, in my opinion.

Too many red herrings

As I said above, the "secret" of Robbie and Emily is alluded through a lot in the book, but not revealed until pretty much the last chapter. At one point, Emily receives notice that her friend Christopher had died and that now they are finally free as Christopher was the last one to know their secret. This is a red herring, as the secret has nothing to do whatsoever with Christopher.

Another part of the book deals extensively with the adoption of Robbie and Emily's son, Adam, and the controversy about his adoption. While there was indeed some shady dealings with Adam's adoption, this is not the secret Emily and Robbie keep talking about. Another red herring.

The book is told backwards

The book begins at the end of Robbie and Emily's life - literally at the end of Robbie's life as he commits suicide. He does so in order to protect Emily, as he has Alzheimers and he is afraid that in his regression he will reveal this terrible secret that he and Emily have been carrying around for years.

Telling a story backwards can be very impactful. One of my favourite examples of this is the film Memento, which is about a man who has suffered memory loss after a brutal attack in which his wife is killed. Every scene keeps you on the edge of your seat until the big reveal at the end, which deal with the attack. The reveal is a shocker, precisely because the main character does not himself remember what has happened, so it's a reveal to him as well as to the viewer.

With Together, this memory loss is not there. Each decade is told from either Robbie or Emily's point of view, but because we already know what is going to happen in the future, there is no tension in the scenes from the past. For example, early on in the book Emily and Robbie refer to William and Adam, their children. Later in the book, in the past, Robbie loses contact with William. He is devastated about it, but the reader already knows that they reconnect, so the reader does not get a chance to grieve as much.

Similarly the story around Adam's adoption. There is talk of Emily and Robbie having to give up Adam, as there is some doubt as to whether Adam's birth mum had voluntarily given Adam up, but because we already know that Adam is still Emily and Robbie's son in the future when he is an adult, we already know that Emily and Robbie decide to keep him. We don't really suffer with them when they have to make this decision.

This book is a clear example of "telling rather than showing". Because everything is already set in stone, as we start in the present and work out way backwards, nothing feels like there is anything at stake. And if nothing is at stake, it is very hard to keep your audience engaged and caring.

The big secret should have been the start of the book

[Major spoiler] The big secret is revealed pretty much in the last chapter when I as a reader was only still along for the ride because I wanted to know what this shocking thing was that Robbie and Emily had done. This terrible secret that had kept Emily estranged from her family for decades. Did they kill someone? Did they abandon a baby? What was so horrible?

It turns out that all they did was fall in love. When Emily took Robbie home to meet her parents, her mum recognised Robbie as the spitting image of the man (Robbie's father) who had impregnated Emily's mum with Emily. Thus making Emily and Robbie half siblings. At first, Emily and Robbie are saddened by this news as they fell head over heels in love with each other. But they do the right thing, break off the "relationship" (they really had only spent a few days together) and go their separate ways. Ten years later, when Emily is married to someone else, they meet again by accident, the flame of their love reignites and they decide to throw all caution in the wind and elope.

This premise - two half siblings falling in love and marrying anyhow - would have been a great premise if the book had started with it. I would have loved to know how they came to terms with this. In the book, Emily is infertile, so that is why they adopted. But what if Emily wasn't infertile, but they decided to adopt instead of risking inbreeding? Maybe we could see a bit more about this amazing love they supposedly have, although the reader does not get to feel that as much.

Instead, we get a story set in stone, told backwards when we already know the outcome of every decision, thereby removing anything at stake. A good rule of story writing is to make the reader care about your character and to give your characters the chance to screw things up. Julie Cohen does neither, thereby making the novel bland and uninspiring when it could have been so intriguing.

Too many coincidences

Coincidences happen in life. I won't deny that. But when your story depends on very important, plot turning coincidences, you really are asking your readers to suspend belief. The first coincidence was Robbie, an American sailor on a stop in England who happened to fall in love with that one English girl who happened to be his half sister. Unless his father had slept around significantly during his - supposedly brief - time in England, this is simply not believable.

The second coincidence was Emily running into Robbie again 10 years later when she visits the US. They run into each other at the airport where he is waiting for his wife and child and she arrives with her husband. Again, this is really not believable and considering the whole plot hinges on this, I would have advised Julie Cohen to make it a bit more believable that Emily and Robbie met again.

There are more things I have issues with in this book, but those are more of a personal taste rather than a deficiency in the plot. I am always annoyed when a book does not met my expectations and when it does not live up to the hype surrounding it. And yes, I was annoyed this time, but I am also happy I could pinpoint what I thought was wrong in the plot and what I would have done differently, as I can learn from this for my own writing. Sorry it turned into a hate-review, but sometimes they need to be written as well.