Kelly Rimmer

The Things We Cannot Say came highly recommended to me by some of my favorite Bookstagram friends. I enjoy the historical fiction genre but it can be a hard one to really wow me as a reader. I went into this one with a little trepidation because it is quite long and while the summary was intriguing I wasn’t sure if I was in the mood for this kind of book during this more hectic time of year. I ended up choosing it as an audiobook and it was a perfect choice. My worries were completely show more unnecessary because I ended up becoming completely engrossed in this storyline.

This book ending up checking all the boxes of a memorable historical fiction reading experience. Told in a dual narrative format, we meet Alina, a girl who is growing up in Poland during World War II and Alice, a mom who lives in present-day Florida with her husband and two children. We quickly realized that these two storylines are connected and the story unfolds beautifully over these 400 pages.

“Not for the first time, I wish just once when I asked my grandmother about the war, instead of her telling me “that was a terrible time, I don’t want to talk about it,” she’d been able to say something more. Anything more. Maybe if she could have shared some of her story, I could have learned from it, I could have taught my children from it—we could have built a better world from the hard lessons she surely learned.”

― Kelly Rimmer, The Things We Cannot Say

This was my first book by Kelly Rimmer and I was blown away by her ability to share multi-faceted characters that felt so real and raw while also diving into a heartbreaking part of our not so distant history. I love the dual storylines and how they wove together and kept me guessing until the end. Rimmer captured the power of sharing our stories while also reminding us that some many people have a history we might know nothing about.

As well as being completely enraptured by Alina’s harrowing and heartbreaking time in Poland, I connected so much with present-day Alice and her struggles to find herself amidst the daily challenges of family life.

“I can’t wait to tell him how much of a revelation it has been to do something like this – standing on a mountaintop for no reason other than the sake of the experience. This moment is an investment in myself. I’m giving myself permission to make a memory that benefits no one but me. I love being a mother, and I love being a wife. I even love being a daughter and a granddaughter. But as I stand here on the mountaintop, I’m not any of those things. I am simply Alice, and for one breathtaking moment, I’m completely present.”

This book captures heartbreak, resilience, persistence and the power for standing up for what is right, not only for yourself but for those around you. This is definitely one of my favorite books of 2019 and I highly recommend it. show less

This book was fantastic! Told in dual timelines, we see the four children in the Walsh family coming together as their father needs to be moved into a memory care facility. The relationships between the four adult children were fantastic, at times warm, at others troubled, and wonderfully real. Beth, the youngest, has recently had her first child, and is struggling, though she doesn’t initially recognize why. She agrees to take on the ask of cleaning out their father’s house and finds show more clues to what may have happened to their mother decades before—and it may not have been what they were always told.

In the second timeline, we hear from Grace and her sister. Sometimes I struggle with flashbacks in novels, particularly when they take up a huge chunk of the narrative, but this one was FANTASTIC and gave a detailed, bleak look at what life was like for women back in a time where they had little agency. When Grace finds herself with four children under the age of four, an alcoholic husband, no money, and crushing postpartum depression, she receives no support. Doctors tell her to buck up. Her family does nothing to help because they do not approve of the marriage. She finds herself pregnant for a fifth time and facing the prospect of a fifth child under the age of five, coniders the terrible option of getting an illegal abortion by an unlicensed person claiming to be a doctor.

What struck me so hard was how the women in this story suffered so much. They had few resources, no way out. The author did a wonderful job of presenting the bleakness of their situation. All of the Walsh children revered their father and considered him a wonderful man and had only perfect memories of how he’d raised them. They were too young to remember the terrible neglect of their early years described in the flashbacks. It was just incredibly well written and devastating and made me grateful that the story in present day could turn out differently.

Trigger Warnings: child neglect, postpartum depression, alcoholism, dementia

Please excuse typos/name misspellings. Entered on screen reader. show less

There's so much WWII-era historical fiction that the plots and stories can feel repetitive, and then there are novels like this one. This is the story of two women, Sofie, the German wife of a scientist who worked on the V2 rockets, and Lizzie, a farm girl who becomes the wife of an American aeronautics specialist. The two women encounter each other after WWII, when their husbands work together in the American space program. A lot of the novel is spent on wrestling with the position of Sofie show more and her husband in Nazi Germany, their complicity in the Holocaust, and their ability and inability to effect change in their country. And afterwards, do Sofie and her family "deserve" a happy ending, a quiet life in an American town? Lizzie, who does not care for Sofie, provides a vocal voice for much of the book by answering these questions to the contrary. The author herself expresses in the note following that she's not certain the historical accurate ending she provide is just. Still, the struggle with these hard questions set this book apart from the many other books in this genre. show less

Truths I Never Told You is a moving, poignant novel of family secrets from Kelly Rimmer.

When the Walsh siblings agree it has become necessary to admit their terminally ill father to a hospice, Beth, the youngest of the four, volunteers to clean out the family home. The process is time-consuming, though straightforward until, behind a padlocked attic door, Beth finds a series of paintings, and pinned to one, a devastating note written by her late mother, Grace.
The missive in her mother’s show more elegant script reads like a suicide note, and the date doesn’t line up with what Beth had been told about her mother’s death. Desperate to understand the discrepancy, Beth throws her self into the search for more notes amongst the detritus cluttering the attic, and unearths a shocking secret that will challenge everything she believed to be true.

Beth’s contemporary timeline, as she cleans out her family home while avoiding her own emotional difficulties, alternates first with a series of letters written by Grace nearly forty years earlier, revealing a young mother overwhelmed by the demands of caring for four children under the age of four, and later, the perspective of Grace’s elder sister, Maryanne.

I was absorbed in this well paced story as Beth and her siblings faced the loss of their beloved father, the truth of Grace’s tragic death, and the unraveling of their childhood memories.

Most emphasis of the story however is placed on the issue linking Beth and Grace - Post Natal Depression. In the late 1950’s Grace’s distress in the aftermath of her pregnancies is dismissed by her doctor, whose advice amounts to ‘pull yourself together’, and is ignored by her husband. In 1996, Beth is unwilling to admit she is not coping with caring for her infant son, and it’s only through the intervention of her husband and sister that she seeks medical help, whose response is immediate and practical.
While I fortunately never developed PND after the births of my four children, many women I know have done so, experiencing a range of symptoms from mild anxiety to the extreme of post natal psychosis. Rimmer’s depiction of Grace and Beth’s struggle is sensitive and realistic, I felt deeply sympathetic towards both women who battled with their feelings of shame and confusion as the illness threatened to overwhelm them.

Rimmer also raises a number of other related issues, including the importance of access to inexpensive contraception, and safe, legal abortion to protect women’s emotional and physical health.

Written with heart and compassion, Truths I Never Told You is a thought-provoking and engaging novel. show less