As a book reviewer, I received a copy of this book for free from the publisher or author to facilitate this review. I received no other compensation, and all opinions are always 100% my own.
Ramona Crawford was adopted as a baby, in a closed adoption. When she turns 18, she goes looking for her birth parents and eventually finds her mother through a DNA site. Her birth certificate yields a name for her father. So Ramona contacts Amy, her birth mother, begging just to ask a few questions.
Amy and her attractive husband run a chain of hotels. They’re polished, successful and happy. Amy agrees to meet Ramona, even though she’s never admitted her existence to her husband and young son. She invites Ramona to join them at a remote Montana lodge, telling Ramona this is where it all happened. She even tells Ramona the story of her birth, and about the father on the birth certificate, another rich successful man in the hotel business. But when Ramona contacts him, he tells a different story. And when confronted, Amy changes her story again, and again.
Amy is hard to pin down. Her eyes shine and her hands move as she tells stories. “You come from artists,” she tells Ramona at one point. She introduces her to the rest of the family with pride. Her energy can seem almost manic, as she insists on taking Ramona on long strenuous hikes along the sides of cliffs or beside steep drop-offs into glacier-fed lakes.
It’s really through her husband’s eyes that I came to like Amy. Her mind runs fast, cycling through possibilities, and she gets impatient when others don’t want to go along with her plans. But she is definitely keeping secrets. How dark and deep will Ramona have to go into her mother’s past before she finally finds out the truth? And will Amy ever be able to admit it?
I’ll Tell You Everything alternates viewpoints between Ramona and Amy, and that works well as you see each of them through the other’s eyes. Amy is a complex character who is well-realized, even when you sometimes want to shake her. The setting, in the remote wilderness of Montana’s mountains, adds its own character to the book. It’s a gripping read. Recommended.