The UNDERNEATH demands exacting attention from its reader. It is a wild ride of stewing twists and turns. Kay, the protagonist, internal life sizzles with the intensity of a thrilling small town mystery. 

If you loved WINTER’S BONE or MARE OF EASTOWN, this book is for you!

As you start reading, just know that italics tell you it’s a flashback, and regular font tells you that we are in the present timeline with Kay and Ben. 

Kay, initially driven by ambition and mystery, eventually finds herself married with two children. And as much as she loves her children, she feels severed from her past sense of self; split between two warring sides of herself. 

Early in the novel, Kay dissolves her marriage and manifests a dangerous mystery to investigate. With her journalist instincts reignited, Kay self-medicates a painful feeling of separation from a previous self that she deeply, deeply misses. 

Melanie Finn holds nothing back when expressing how Kay’s inner life vacillates between profound love and nagging resentment of her children. Finn even articulates Kay’s secret self-loathing for the woman she seems to have lost when she became consumed by parenthood.

Kay embarks on a self-imposed investigation into the owner of her rented vacation home. She puts her life in danger and risks more than she has ever risked—even when she was a war journalist, to chase the sensations of her younger self. 

Ultimately, she stares in the face of death and finds herself craving her children. Only then can she realize the wholeness of the many sides of herself. 

Ben is the male counterpart to Kay’s journey and he too, finds redemption in his new found parenthood. 

Additionally, Melanie Finn explores the vast divide between wealth and poverty. She looks at the elements that are out of our control —where we are born; what parents we are born to; what abuses shape the self. She does all this without explaining herself. These elements wind into the fabric of the characters who are all enmeshed in the tapestry of a plot that exposes mysteries hiding in the most ordinary events.

I keep returning to Finn’s writing because she has an unrelenting and unapologetic mastery of the internal life of women. She pulls no punches as she exposes the underbelly of all the messy that simmers under the beauty.  The magic of relatability shines through her words. The way she arranges those words keeps us both loving her characters and desperately desiring for them to win—whatever that might mean.